Summary
Öhman Fonder actively engages with companies on various ESG matters. The asset manager’s engagement is directed toward companies that fulfill one or more of four key requirements:
Companies aligned with Öhman Fonder's focus areas (Human Rights, Biodiversity, or Climate).
Companies that are the subject of initiatives initiated, endorsed by, or participated in by Öhman Fonder.
Incidents or controversies have occurred during Öhman Fonder's ownership of the company.
Companies lacking adequate sustainability reporting, making risk and opportunity analysis challenging.
This case study focuses on W-Scope, a company involved in the manufacturing of lithium-ion secondary battery separators used in portable electronics like computers, smartphones, electric vehicles, and fuel cells.
Due to W-Scope being in the early stages of its sustainability reporting journey, the analysis of sustainability risks and opportunities has been challenging for Öhman Fonder. Thus, an engagement has been initiated with W-Scope to address this topic.
This case study illustrates how Öhman Fonder employs Esgaia’s platform to follow best practices in engagement tracking, achieving:
structured objectives with deadlines,
complete activity trails,
clear progress evidence, and
stellar reporting.
Client
Öhman Fonder, Sweden's largest independent asset manager, manages approximately 14 billion EUR in assets under management. The firm embraces sustainable asset management through long-termism, responsibility, and active ownership.
Challenge
While investors are increasingly engaged in their investments, activities like recording, monitoring, and reporting stewardship efforts can be complex without suitable tools. Common systems like Excel lack features such as linking activities to engagement profiles, setting deadlines, and receiving timely notifications, which can hinder the success of long-term engagements.
Solution and implementation
Engagement Topics:
Investors set their own typology of (sub-) topics in Esgaia to be identified by users when they record interactions to ensure engagements and activities are mapped coherently. In this case, as the initiated engagement with W-Scope regarded the company’s sustainability disclosure and ambitions, Öhman Fonder linked the topic of ‘Sustainability Reporting” and sub-topic ‘Climate’ to an engagement profile.
Engagement profile: Öhman Fonder created an engagement profile to structure and link information, objectives, and interactions over time. Examples of objectives for W-Scope include:
Integrate CDP results in annual and sustainability reports.
Disclose scope 3 emissions.
Set climate targets.
Get climate targets approved by The Science-based Target initiative (SBTi).
Activity recording:
Specific activities, such as initial email outreach, company responses, and digital meetings discussing the topic, are linked to the engagement profile, forming a comprehensive data trail presented in a timeline.
Progress monitoring:
As objectives are achieved, Öhman Fonder marks them as completed, adding notes and evidence of progress. Reminders for objectives are set within the software to ensure timely follow-up.
Stakeholder reporting:
Recorded information is enabled for analytics and reporting, and can either be extracted as an engagement-specific case study (PDF), or in raw format (Excel/CSV) with information about the engagement, progress to date, performed activities, and so forth.
Viktoria Voskressenskaia, Sustainability analyst, Öhman Fonder, comments:
"With Esgaia's software, we improve our stewardship data management, saving valuable time and resources. The systematic tracking of our stewardship efforts enhances our reporting strategy and responsiveness to client requests amid increasing scrutiny from stakeholders."
Video exemplifying user experience and workflow via Esgaia (demo account):