Melville Douglas, the asset management division of Standard Bank Jersey Ltd, has recently launched a US Dollar retail share class of its Jersey domiciled Melville Douglas Select Fund Ltd – Global Impact Class, which has an inception date of March 2021.
The objective of the Fund is to generate competitive financial returns, whilst delivering tangible positive social and environmental impact, and is benchmarked against the MSCI All Country World Index. Through its underlying investments, the Fund aims to address what Melville Douglas believes are the world’s most pressing climate, social, and environmental challenges, that if left unaddressed, pose a very real threat to the sustainability of society and the environment. These challenges, based on the World Economic Forum’s assessment of long-term global risks, include climate action failure, natural disasters and extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and erosion of social cohesion and societal polarisation.
Incorporating these risks into the investment strategy, the Fund focuses on opportunities in its three core Impact Themes of Climate Change, Biodiversity Preservation, and Health and Wellbeing. Within these themes, extensive multi-decade, structural growth opportunities exist as significant financial, human, and natural capital is deployed to address these challenges, making the Global Impact Fund a compelling long-term investment.
The Fund is an actively managed, high-conviction portfolio, consisting of 30-40 stocks. Key to the investment process is a proprietary Impact Assessment, which determines a stock’s eligibility for inclusion into the Fund. The Impact Assessment provides a consistent framework for the measurement and evaluation of a company’s impact. It involves the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data to assess the impact thesis, impact theory of change, emissions reduction targets and delivery of tangible social and/or environmental impact. An evaluation of trends in the key Principal Adverse Impact (PAI) indicators determines the company’s focus and intent on transitioning to an inclusive, low carbon and/or circular economy. In addition to the analysis of this data is strong emphasis that the company’s activities ‘do no serious harm’ to the environment and society.
Eligible companies are then subjected to detailed fundamental analysis as part of the tried and tested Melville Douglas investment process, to ensure that they are high-quality, long-term growth compounders, which are reasonably priced from a valuation perspective. A detailed Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) analysis to address Sustainability Risk is also performed during this stage.
Reporting of the Fund’s impact is aligned with UN sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) consistent with the Fund’s Impact Themes, to provide a common and comparable assessment of the impact created. The reported data represents an aggregation of the tangible impact delivered by the individual investee companies.
Visit our website to find out more about the Fund, and how you can invest to drive positive change.