Principles for Responsible Investment
Bâtirente was one of the first signatories of the Principles for Responsible Investment. A member of the board of directors of the PRI since its inception, Bâtirente is working on several of its committees.
What Are These Principles?
The goal of these six Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) is to integrate environmental, social and governance issues to investment and performance reporting practices.
The principles were developed by traditional financial institutions for traditional financial institutions. It is thus not an initiative reserved for ethical investors, although they easily recognize themselves in the elements that the principles are promoting.
The six principles are voluntary and are complemented by a list proposing various actions that can be taken to implement each one of the principles. Still, the list of possible actions is not exhaustive and may be adapted to the business model of each signatory institution. Every year, signatories must indicate how they apply the principles or provide an explanation when they do not comply. This performance reporting helps to assess signatory performance. The results obtained by Bâtirente confirm its leading position.
Board of Directors
From the beginning, Bâtirente has been represented on the PRI Board of Directors. One of the first tasks of the Board was to give the principles a strategic action plan and to strengthen its governance structures. The PRI thus developed a constitution that was adopted at the June 2007 annual general meeting. This constitution provides for the election method, and the duration of mandates, for Board members, among other topics. The mandate of Bâtirente will expire in June of 2009.
Assessment Committee
Once again this year, Bâtirente remained a member of the PRI Assessment Committee. The committee’s duty is to work in co-operation with the PRI Secretariat to develop the annual questionnaire, which all PRI signatories are asked to complete. The questionnaire provides a way for each signatory to measure their own progress against their peers, while providing a tool to follow up on the global performance of all signatories and to identify which improvement strategies to implement.
“Small Funds” Committee
Pursuant to the July 2007 PRI annual meeting, at which Bâtirente was invited to present its business model related to extrafinancial risks management, the PRI Secretariat decided to establish a new task force mandated to develop tools to help holders of less than one billion dollars’ worth of assets under management to implement the PRI.
Various avenues are now being explored to promote “small funds”.
Clearinghouse
The Clearinghouse is an Intranet platform implemented by the PRI Secretariat to support the efforts of signatories in applying Principles 2 and 5. It is a co-operation and co-ordination tool that can be used to seek the support of other signatories for specific campaigns. Collective actions can also be undertaken by a signatory and co-ordinated by the Secretariat, as in the case of the Seoul Initiative. The Intranet platform is also an information-sharing tool through which signatory institutions can find or post information on the results of actions conducted with enterprises.
Seoul Initiative
