Ausbil Active Sustainable Equity Fund

Product Name	Ausbil Active Sustainable Equity Fund
Issuer	Ausbil
Category	Investment
Type	Fund or Trust
Target	Retail, Wholesale, Institutional
Certified Since	2020

Asset Classes	Australian only equities
Markets	Australia
Investment Approaches	Best in class screening, Negative Screening
It Includes:	Green property Healthcare and medical products Renewable energy and energy efficiency More sustainable companies
It has some level of screening for:	Alcohol Animal cruelty Armaments Fossil fuels Gambling Genetic engineering Human rights abuses Nuclear power Pornography Tobacco
It fully excludes:
Broker	Responsible Returns
URL	https://www.responsiblereturns.com.au/investment-options/ausbil-active-sustainable-equity-fund-1/profile

Overview

Ausbil’s active investment process aims to exploit the inefficiencies across the market, at all stages of the cycle and across all market conditions, with the aim of producing consistent and risk controlled out-performance. Ausbil’s sustainable approach to investing allows the Fund to invest in companies that have a relatively good sustainability profile, as well as the removal of companies subject to long-term earnings risk from sustainability factors, whilst actively engaging with companies on sustainability issues and the wider industry that they operate in.

Description

The universe is refined to remove companies subject to long-term earnings sustainability risk including companies with material direct exposure or a significant indirect exposure to:

the production or distribution of alcohol, tobacco1, gambling, pornography and weapons & armaments2; or
the mining of uranium; or
the exploration, mining and/or distribution of fossil fuels, such as oil, gas, oil sands and coal.

Material direct exposure is defined as 10% or more of earnings from one or a combination of the above controversial activities.

Ausbil’s dedicated ESG team researches on a proprietary basis, assesses and scores a company based on the industry in which a company operates in (ie what a company does) and a company’s ESG factors (ie how a company manages these factors). The combination being a sustainability score, which indicates a company’s sustainability profile. A company’s sustainability score is subsequently combined equally with the equity analyst’s conviction score to allow Ausbil to rank each company in the remaining investible universe. At least half of the Fund’s portfolio must be constructed from the top third ranked companies.

1. The investable universe has no exposure to tobacco companies, therefore the Fund will have no direct exposure to tobacco companies.

2. Please note that the Fund has a particularly low tolerance to companies that manufacture nuclear missiles, landmines and cluster munitions.

Performance results

Product holdings

Product documentation

Supporting documents

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The products featured on this site have all achieved certification under the Responsible Investment Association Australasia’s (RIAA) Responsible Investment Certification Program.

Transparency & Verification

What sets these investment products aside from regular ones on the market is they all have some type of responsible or ethical strategy applied to them.

At a minimum, their issuers explain these strategies in public documents and open their offices and books to third party verifiers who check these strategies are implemented according to what you read about them publicly.

You can also click through to see the underlying managers and / or stock holdings in each certified product as well as access a certified product’s recent performance results.

Stewardship & Impact

In July 2019, we lifted our requirements of certified products which we are phasing in over 18 months.

We now require that issuers have organisation-wide commitments to responsible investing and they exercise their responsibilities as stewards of your money - through engaging with companies to improve sustainability performance and voting on shareholder resolutions where possible. All certified products now need to at least avoid significant harm and their issuers will annually report against any sustainability-based claims made by their products. This uplift in program standards is part of our passion for, and on-going commitment to, responsible and ethical investing.

Even though we're lifting the bar, we know your convictions to doing good with your money may be higher and so we have served up our member's certified products with a large dose of transparency and independent verification, so that you can draw your own conclusions from reliable information and choose investments that best suit your individual needs.

*Information Disclosures

While all reasonable efforts are undertaken to ensure information and links on site are current there may be instances where information and documents are updated during the course certification (eg. PDS, Fact Sheet). Certified product issuers are required to update this information as soon as possible on the Responsible Returns site, but there may be some extenuating circumstances impacting timeframes.

The certification program may also assess information provided for certification based on proposed future changes to a responsible investment process that is in-line with Responsible Investment Association Australasia’s (RIAA) Responsible Investment Certification Program criteria. In such instances, members are similarly required to update this information on Responsible Returns within an agreed future timeframe. Old document versions may be reflected on site until this process is finalised.

Ausbil Active Sustainable Equity Fund

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