The Betterworld team’s mission is to enable investors to meet their financial objectives while aligning their investment to a sustainable future. It does that by managing Canadian and global mandates prioritizing and investing in companies with progressive ESG practices and behaviours.
“The team is really guided by the belief that the way we treat the planet and the communities we operate in will determine their future profitability,” said Simpson. “So, for us to uncover sustainability leaders in our investment process, we lead it with ESG and live analysis. It’s not a bolt-on step for us. It’s a fully integrated aspect of our security selection, and that’s a key differentiator for the team out there in the industry.”
Simpson said the Betterworld approach applies a stakeholder lens to differentiate companies who demonstrate progressive ESG practices and behaviours. It identifies six primary stakeholders with a vested interest in how the companies perform to assess the communities they operate in and the customers they serve. Those can include employees, suppliers, and even the environment, and not just the shareholders
“If a company can successfully balance the interest of stakeholders, it can better capture opportunity to build competitive advantage and grow economic value,” he said.
Betterworld has a four-stage process to generate impact: avoid, assess, analyze, and advocate. It avoids controversial companies, and then assesses their ability to create positive impact through their products and services. It analyses their financial metric to validate core growth drivers and identify sustainability leaders, and then advocates through shareholder engagement by dialoguing with the management teams of the companies that it owns to manage ESG risks and deliver positive impact to their stakeholders.
