Global SWF turns four years old today, and we celebrate it with the third edition of our GSR Scoreboard, which assesses the Governance, Sustainability, and Resilience progress by the world’s leading State-Owned Investors.
The GSR Scoreboard was first introduced by the Global SWF team in 2020 as an assessment tool for the best practices of certain institutional investors, including sovereign wealth funds and public pension funds. We believe that important aspects such as transparency and accountability, responsible investing, and legitimacy and long-term survival are not mutually exclusive and must be considered jointly.
The scoring is based on 25 different elements: 10 related to governance, 10 to sustainability, and five to resilience. These questions, which have not changed since 2020, are answered binarily (Yes/No) with equal weight based on publicly-available information only, and then converted into % points. The system is rigorous, quantitative, and fully independent, as the funds in question do not pay any membership fee to be assessed.
The GSR has rapidly become a measuring stick of the industry’s best practices as it is rigorous, quantitative, and fully independent. This year’s exercise, which collected 5,000 datapoints (200 funds * 25 elements), concludes that:
Sovereign Investors are making an effort to become more transparent and sustainable; however, resilience is still an evolving concept that will be put to the test again under the current financial environment.
ESG is starting to be regarded as a key risk to be tackled, but regular and detailed reporting of responsible investing activities is still an issue.
This year had eight leaders with a 96% score: CPP, CDPQ and BCI (Canada), PGGM and ISIF (Europe), and Temasek, Future Fund and NZ Super (Asia-Pacific) – don’t miss our chat with Ed Cass, CPP Investments’ CIO.
The Middle East continues to be the worst region in terms of GSR but has improved significantly since last year.
Newest funds are starting off the right foot as they follow best practices from more established funds.
There is a positive correlation between GSR scores (especially, “G” scores) and financial returns.
The web-based report can now be accessed openly at https://globalswf.com/reports/2022gsr. Click on the icon on the top right-hand corner to download and print an old-fashioned pdf (it reads best in a two-page view).
For those interested, we will be hosting a Zoom session to discuss the market’s latest developments and this year’s GSR – please register at https://bit.ly/2022gsr and tune in on July 7, at 8am EST / 1pm BST / 4pm GST / 8pm CST.
