Michael Baldinger, a former Wall Street trader, on making UBS' $800 billion in asset management money greener and more socially responsible. It's also a bid to woo wealthy millennials, he tells finews.ch-TV.
The former «flash» trader has one of the best jobs at UBS at the moment: Michael Baldinger is the Swiss bank's head of sustainable and impact investing in asset management. He joined two years ago after UBS' Chairman Axel Weber championed a drive towards environmental, social and governance in investing, part of a bid to woo millennial wealthy.
UBS views sustainable investing less as Birkenstock-clad activists and more as good business, Baldinger makes clear. «We’re trying to embed these criteria into our research process, making it the norm», he told finews.ch-TV:
«There's nothing ideological about it – it's really how we look at companies before we make an investment», Baldinger says. Sustainable investing recently hit the $23 trillion mark worldwide, with Europe accounting for two-thirds – the sector has burgeoned in Switzerland, the Nordics, France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands – and the U.S. at roughly one-third.
Asian Dawning
However, the U.S. is growing at roughly three times the pace of Europe, and Asia including China is also waking up to what Baldinger says already is mainstream among institutional investors, thanks to Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund, or GPIF, the world's largest pension fund.
By the end of this year, he and a team of roughly 20 bankers, several from Robeco SAM which Baldinger previously ran before joining Switzerland's largest bank in 2016, aim to have shifted the active fixed income and equities part of its $800 billion asset management unit towards environmental, social, and governance criteria.
- Click here to hear why Baldinger left his previous CEO job, what part of his business China makes for, and who his Asian «superhero» is.
