NICE, France, Sept. 27, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ERI Scientific Beta announced today, September 27, 2016, that it has signed the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI).
Forerunners in the domain of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) and low carbon smart beta investing, EDHEC-Risk Institute and ERI Scientific Beta have been providing a custom SRI smart beta index to the additional pension scheme for French civil servants, ERAFP, for over five years (since June 2011). Earlier this year ERAFP announced that it is awarding a mandate to asset managers for a listed equities portfolio worth €500 million to €1 billion that will be benchmarked to the Scientific Beta Eurozone Max Sharpe Ratio ERAFP SRI Carbon Efficient index. ERI Scientific beta has been supplying an SRI-compliant custom version of its flagship Multi-Beta Multi-Strategy index to a major Scandinavian investor since 2014.
In early 2015, ERI Scientific Beta launched a series of low carbon smart beta indices that enable institutional investors to significantly reduce the carbon intensity of their equity investments, while at the same time outperforming traditional market indices. The exclusion from the index of the largest carbon emitters, the worst firms in terms of carbon intensity in each sector of activity, and the largest holders of fossil assets, guarantees that these indices have a strong positive impact on the environment by weighing on the value of the stocks of the excluded firms, thereby obliging them to change their strategy or their production process in order to be removed from the exclusion list.
Noël Amenc, CEO of ERI Scientific Beta, said, "ERI Scientific Beta is proud to be a signatory of the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Investment. The low carbon and SRI-screened indices produced by ERI Scientific Beta offer access to outperformance by using consensual results from financial research in the area of smart beta and portfolio diversification, while ensuring that the low carbon and SRI aspects of the indices contribute to a positive environmental impact."
"We are delighted to welcome ERI Scientific Beta to the PRI," said Managing Director Fiona Reynolds. "Their leadership in developing tools that help investors reduce the carbon intensity of their investments, and manage risk in order to maximise returns, fits very well with the PRI Principles, especially now, as investors look closely at material risks around climate change."
As part of its policy of transferring know-how to the industry, EDHEC-Risk Institute has set up ERI Scientific Beta. ERI Scientific Beta is an original initiative which aims to favour the adoption of the latest advances in smart beta design and implementation by the whole investment industry. Its academic origin provides the foundation for its strategy: offer, in the best economic conditions possible, the smart beta solutions that are most proven scientifically with full transparency of both the methods and the associated risks.
ERI Scientific Beta, 1 George Street, #07-02, Singapore 049145. For further information, please contact: contact@scientificbeta.com , Web: www.scientificbeta.com .
Press_release_UNPRI_signatory.pdf http://hugin.info/157174/R/2044876/763692.pdf
