Brussels-based Fortis Investments has underlined its commitment to sustainable and responsible investment by setting up a dedicated SRI in...

Brussels-based Fortis Investments has underlined its commitment to sustainable and responsible
investment by setting up a dedicated SRI investment centre in Frankfurt. This decision was motivated by Fortis Investments’ commitment to its German strategic partner Versiko and to the strong market potential for SRI in Germany. Fortis Investments aims to be a leading provider of sustainable investment solutions for European retail and institutional clients.

Stewart Armer, product CIO, has moved from Paris to Frankfurt, with three colleagues from Germany, Bulgaria and France. The team is expected to expand to eight to ten people during 2007.

“Clients are increasingly demanding investment approaches that not only deliver investment returns but that also take account of social, environmental and governance issues. SRI managers need to go further than simple negative exclusion approaches towards processes that identify those companies that are actually building competitive advantage through responding to sustainability challenges. These companies are rethinking their business models and reorienting their product portfolios,” said Mr Armer.

Fortis Investments believes that understanding the financial implications of sustainability issues and companies’ responses to them must be at the core of a sustainable investment process and offers the potential to deliver strong investment performance to clients.

Fortis Investments’ decision to fully resource a dedicated SRI unit means that it will be able to meet its target of delivering market-leading products and processes in what it believes to be a fast-growing segment of the market.

“We identified the German market as potentially one of the most SRI-oriented markets in
Europe, with strong growth and continuing demand for socially-responsible investments”, said Josef Pfannenstill, head of sales for Germany, Austria and Central and Eastern Europe. He expects considerable inflows into the new SRI investment centre in 2007, in particular from the German retail and institutional market.

Fortis Investments’ track record in SRI management started ten years ago with the launch of Capital Emploi (France), in 1998 of Altervision (Belgium) and the creation in 2002 of the FLF SRI range of products (Luxembourg).

In 2005, it further increased its commitment to SRI with the acquisition of a 25 per cent stake in Versiko and took over the management of Versiko's flagship fund Oekovision which has assets currently under management of €356 million ($451 million).