Groupama Asset Management

With nearly 86 billion euros of assets under management, Groupama Asset Management, a subsidiary of Groupama, France’s leading mutual insurance group, is the 6th largest asset management company in France. Its clients include other companies of Groupama group, as well as external institutional, corporate and retail investors, whose share of the business continues to grow strongly. Based in Paris, Groupama Asset Management develops and applies a variety of management approaches acknowledged for their excellence covering equity, bond, diversified, responsible investment and alternative fund of fund strategies. Groupama Asset Management is now a recognized force in its industry and a market leader.

Groupama Asset Management is convinced that responsible investment is triggering a virtuous circle that will foster sustainable development. Socially Responsible Investment is a valuable opportunity for the company to assume its social duty and fiduciary responsibility, considering the application of Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) sustainability principles is perfectly aligned with long-term financial performance; for these reasons Groupama Asset Management has been involved in the SRI field since 2000. Groupama Asset Management first started to develop SRI niche products with the support of external service providers. At the same time, the asset management company has carried out ongoing in-house research and also taken part in several SRI/SD international workshops groups in order to strengthen its SRI knowledge, expertise and processes and to develop new portfolio management tools.

Since 2006, Groupama Asset Management has been working on the full integration of the ESG dimension into buy-side analysis. SRI analysis is undertaken jointly with fundamental analysis by our in-house research teams (macro-economic, financial and credit analysis). Based on risk and opportunity considerations, the research is conducted on a sector basis in order to address relevant and material issues and meet Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance objectives. For each security, a security scorecard takes ESG performance criteria into account with adjusted weightings per pillar (E, S, and G) depending on the different sectors.

With more than 1.8 billion euros of SRI assets under management and taking advantage of the solid foundations that have been laid over several years, the challenge for the asset management company is now to improve its universe coverage in order to extend the SRI approach to mainstream asset classes with an end objective of complying with PRI’ s commitment and meeting its fiduciary responsibility.