“We missed you”, quipped Jeremy Golding as he opened the event for the nearly 180 investors and business partners who had logged in to the Virtual Golding Investor Day 2021. He continued by expressing his hope that the meeting would be able to take place in person again soon. Even though a virtual event was “much healthier”, because it meant there was no opportunity for late-night conversations at the bar, he still missed the analogue contacts, said the founder of Golding Capital Partners with a wink.
Despite all the turbulence caused by the pandemic, Golding Capital Partners has worked hard in the past twelve months, recruiting new staff, launching new products and raising new funds, making investments and continuing to refine its sustainability profile, which is also the overarching theme of this year’s event. Jeremy Golding did “not want a medal” for this commitment to ESG topics, but rather saw the company progressing systematically towards impact investing, which makes a measurable, transparent contribution to solving social problems, said the founder, before welcoming Karsten Löffler, the keynote speaker of the event.
Löffler is an expert on sustainability from the Frankfurt School of Finance and chairs the federal government’s Sustainable Finance Committee. He gave a detailed portrayal of the transformation of the financial sector towards sustainability. The academic is convinced that the momentum behind these developments at the national and European level is now forcing financial companies to make their business models fit for the future. He particularly emphasised the reporting and risk awareness aspects.
Exerting greater influence
In his presentation Dr Matthias Reicherter, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer, demonstrated that sustainable investing is already the “new normal” at Golding. The company has included sustainability aspects in its investment process since 2012, and since 2018 Golding has used a dedicated ESG scoring model to evaluate target funds. This evaluation process is being expanded by the initiative ESG@Golding 3.0, which aims to exert influence over fund managers. Conscious that mitigating the impact of global warming is one of the biggest challenges facing the global community, Golding is now redoubling its efforts to slow climate change in particular, and expanding its climate risk management.
The Investor Day went on to cover impact investing, the EU Disclosure Regulation and the asset classes private equity, private debt and infrastructure in the context of ESG management. Managing Partner Hubertus Theile-Ochel summed up the meeting by saying that there was no contradiction between “investing well and doing the right thing”. Golding’s investors had a duty to generate attractive returns for their pensioners, their insured and their organisations, he said. Golding intended to support them in the task of achieving this with an increasing focus on sustainability, he said.
The event, which was streamed live to India, Britain, France and Switzerland, showed what modern technology was capable of, noted Theile-Ochel. But despite this he was definitely looking forward to seeing people again in person – at the latest at the next Golding Investor Day in June 2022.
That was the Virtual Golding Investor Day 2021 (video)
