Danish pension providers Industriens Pension and PenSam say they are joining a project created by statutory pension fund ATP, which aims to provide better data and more knowledge about sustainability work by the unlisted companies in their portfolios.
The labour market pension funds said there was a need for better data for investors on how many unlisted companies worked with ESG, adding that solid ESG reporting benefitted returns by raising the reputation of companies, reducing risk and thus increasing pricing.
Peter Lindegaard, chief investment officer at Industriens Pension, said: “We are convinced that this tool can give us a lot of extra knowledge about ESG matters in the unlisted companies, which we can use in our dialogue with the companies about, for example, environmental matters and good corporate governance.”
The firm said that while listed investments had seen a large increase in focus on ESG data in recent years, unlisted investments often lacked such information.
In 2020, ATP developed a questionnaire and a database targeted at unlisted investments to create a better overview of ESG work in the sector and increase dialogue to support companies’ efforts in the area.
Mikkel Svenstrup, CIO at ATP, said: “The collaboration in the unlisted area means that we are now three pension companies, which in future will share our anonymised data and get a broader, and thus better, knowledge base for how unlisted companies, too, can develop in an even more sustainable and responsible direction.”
ATP said the questionnaire would be the same for the three companies, with each of them deciding for themselves how to implement the knowledge acquired. All three companies would receive all data, the pension fund said, giving them access to a much larger amount of information on which to base both analyses and dialogue.
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