Including ESG matters in equity and bond investments is very down to earth and part of the portfolio manager’s day-to-day work when selecting investments and managing funds. Our goal is to seek best returns in all our stratgies and the ESG process plays a significant role in achieving the goal. Our investment processes are typically designed to identify long term sustainable growth and profitability and therefore ESG is imbedded in the process in selection and monitoring stages.
One of the most important areas is the availability of the sustainability reporting, where we have for years actively encouraged companies to better transparency. In practice, we go through all our investments with the ESG metrics that we have selected. Since 2018, our own sustainability assessment work has been supported by ISS-Ethix, which monitors the contents of our funds quarterly to detect any violations of the UN's Global Compact principles. This information is used actively in the interaction with companies, and in all serious violations, we will launch a separate follow-up process of our own in order to find out if the investment is still in line with our responsibility principles for long-term ownership. The number of serious violations has remained very low in 2019, and is limited to a few companies world-wide.
We have one thematic fund which is positioned with social and environmental themes (eQ Blue Planet). Also, we manage a tailor-made low carbon strategy.