Sustainable Investments
We are global institutional investors and investment management is a key aspect of the insurance business. It has a significant impact on the real economy, allowing us to actively influence areas such as good governance practice of our investee’s companies, environmental protection and respect for human rights and labour rights.
We are signatories of the United Nations Global Compact and the Principles for Responsible Investments (PRI) and for a number of years now we have been basing our investment strategies also on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) criteria, without sacrificing profitability. In addition, we have continued to uphold the principle of protecting our most sensitive asset: our reputation.
Generali Group formalized its commitment to responsible investment in 2006 and in 2010 its own Group Ethical Guidelines were approved. In 2015, we further developed our approach in the Responsible Investment Group Guideline document.
In particular, we identify, assess and monitor the investments that are most exposed to social, environmental and corporate governance risks for all our Group insurance companies’ portfolios.
Our commitment to responsible investment also resulted in the establishment of the Group Responsible Investment Committee, which comprises representatives of the main functions involved in investment management. The Committee is in charge for supporting the GCIO in:
- integrating ESG criteria into the investment decision process;
- evaluating issuers not aligned with the ESG criteria set out by the Group and taking a decision regarding their possible inclusion in Restricted List or Watch List;
- discussing and reviewing the results of the monitoring activities of Group exposure to ESG risk from investment and following up on the implementation of GCIO decisions.
Our objective is to leverage our role of institutional investor to foster change through investment. We use dialogue to encourage issuer companies to act responsibly, asking them to justify their conduct if it does not meet the sustainability standards set by the Group.
For the wider purpose of steering the role of the Group as an active owner, we defined a comprehensive Group Active Ownership Framework, regulated by a Group Guideline document.
The Active Ownership Group Guideline – Asset Owner has been drawn up in compliance with the obligations introduced by the Shareholder Rights Directive II as regards the engagement policy of institutional investors (Art. 3g of Directive (EU) 2017/828 amending Directive 2007/36/EC), the Sustainability-related Disclosures in the Financial Services Sector (EU Regulation 2019/2088), and duly takes into account best practices from international standards to which the Group adheres.