Engaging Our Fund Managers

As a sustainability-focused long-term investor, we engage our asset management businesses and external fund managers we invest with to advance responsible investment practices.

Our asset management businesses represent 14% of our unlisted portfolio and include Seviora Holdings, Pavilion Capital, and Vertex Holdings. Our asset management businesses manage around S$83 billion in assets, which include third-party capital as well as our own capital.

Investments in private equity and credit funds represent 20% of our unlisted portfolio. They have enabled us to gain deeper insights into new markets and sub-sectors of specialisation while providing co-investment opportunities.

While the investment exposure through our asset management businesses and private equity and credit funds is relatively small in contrast to our direct investments, we also extend our ESG philosophy to these investments.

In assessing external fund managers, we evaluate their ESG approach from an investment lifecycle perspective to understand their ESG commitment, due diligence, stewardship practices, and reporting to investors on ESG. In line with our own climate commitment, we seek to understand how they manage climate-related risks and opportunities, referencing leading international frameworks.

On an ongoing basis, we engage in conversations with these managers to foster mutual learning and best practice sharing. We expect the external managers to adopt a similar mindset of continuous improvement and to strive to apply best industry practices in managing material ESG issues for their portfolios. We monitor the ESG practices of our key external managers through an annual ESG survey, where they share their latest ESG initiatives and plans going forward, for the core areas of our assessment. We also have deeper and more regular engagements with external managers for which we have active investment positions in the fund management company, beyond just fund investments.