Christian Heiberg, can you please describe your role as the CIO of Danske Bank Asset Management?

As CIO, in what way do you regard sustainable investment to be part of this?

“Very much in the same way, actually. I think there is a tendency to think of ESG analysis and investing as a completely different ball game, something that needs to be treated more on the side by ESG analysts, supplementing the financial analyses our portfolio managers carry out. There are those who think you need to be “passionate” about sustainability to really understand the full implications of it. I lead an organisation that is extremely passionate about investments and in being so they will look into all relevant aspects of a given investment opportunity, be they sustainability related or not. Hence, the analyses and decisions taken from a sustainability point of view need to be placed where the competence, knowledge, and insights into the asset class and the concrete investment opportunities reside. In other words, it is integrated into all other relevant analyses at an investment team level.”

How does the ESG Integration Council fit into this picture?

“The Council is where I as CIO can take the lead in terms of ESG-related matters. It is an important forum for me to strengthen and reinforce our view on sustainable investments, i.e. organised bottom-up and anchored in our strategy ESG Inside®. Moreover, this is the forum where the investment organisation discusses and evaluates ESG risks and dilemmas, reviews and endorses investment restrictions, decides on collaborative engagements, and decides on other topics of relevance across my organisation.”

Can you give a concrete example?

“Last year, we took the decision to restrict investments in tobacco companies. As such, it is never an easy decision to expand investment restrictions, but with the research presented and the amount of client input included the decision to restrict was not that difficult.”

What else did have the Council discussed?

“One important initiative was the new, or rather the second, Shareholders’ Rights Directive. Clearly, this is something we cannot conceptually implement bottom-up and where we need firm commitment across the investment organisation. In many ways, I think our organisation was quite prepared, in the sense that we were already able to report on our engagements in a quite detailed way, for example. One concrete outcome of the work with the Shareholders’ Rights Directive was the voting guidelines, which was implemented in 2020. Among other things, the guidelines set out some important rule-based approaches to more standardised proposals for the Annual General Meetings (AGM). This will not only save time and increase consistency across our actively managed portfolios, it enables us to vote on passive holdings, an important step to further develop and elevate our sustainable investment offering across our product range.”