Sustainable and impact investments seek positive social and environmental effects while targeting competitive financial returns.
Pursue positive change. Seek competitive returns.
Our Approach
By focusing on what’s important to your organization, we begin by understanding your endowment or foundation’s short- and long-term investment goals, creating a unique blend of managers and styles, whether focused on climate change, affordable housing, gender equality or other investment preferences, that support all facets of your organization’s mission.
While sustainable and impact investing focuses on sustainable responsible companies and funds, the end goal is to help your organization meet its financial needs. Our approach highlights the connections between business performance and societal benefit and helps you invest to reflect your mission while pursuing competitive returns.
You can choose the impact approaches that you prefer through our A-B-C framework:1
- Avoid: Seeks to reduce negative social or environmental effects and manage risk by limiting certain exposures
- Benefit: Seeks to support positive social or environmental practices and enhance potential for long-term competitive financial returns
- Contribute: Seeks to advance positive, measurable social or environmental outcomes and target opportunities where impact is intrinsic to financial performance
We also use environmental, social and governance data and metrics to assess the sustainability profiles of investments across the following themes:
- People: Commitment to engaged and healthy workers
- Planet: Contributions to climate and sustainability and environmental responsibility
- Principles of Governance: Commitment to ethics and societal benefit
- Prosperity: Contributions to equitable, innovative economic growth and sustainable communities
Services
Related Solutions
1 The “A-B-C” framework that helps classify the impact objective of a sustainable strategy was adapted from The Impact Management Project. The Impact Management Project is a forum for building global consensus on how to measure, compare and report ESG risks and positive impacts.
The Chief Investment Office (CIO) provides thought leadership on wealth management, investment strategy and global markets; portfolio management solutions; due diligence; and solutions oversight and data analytics. CIO viewpoints are developed for Bank of America Private Bank, a division of Bank of America, N.A., (“Bank of America”) and Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated (“MLPF&S” or “Merrill”), a registered broker-dealer, registered investment adviser and a wholly owned subsidiary of Bank of America Corporation (“BofA Corp.”).
Impact investing and/or Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) managers may take into consideration factors beyond traditional financial information to select securities, which could result in relative investment performance deviating from other strategies or broad market benchmarks, depending on whether such sectors or investments are in or out of favor in the market. Further, ESG strategies may rely on certain values based criteria to eliminate exposures found in similar strategies or broad market benchmarks, which could also result in relative investment performance deviating.
