Investment Stewardship

RAM AI actively supports, through membership or being a signatory of, the following organisations, principles and initiatives:

• Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI)
• Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP)
• Swiss Sustainable Finance (SSF)
• Geneva Sustainable Finance (GSF)
• UN Global Compact
• Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC)
• Climate Action 100+
• Climate Neutral Now Pledge
• Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)
• Access to Medicine 

RAM AI is committed to active ownership. We see it as an integral part of our responsible investment policy and in line with our goal to be a responsible active investment manager. RAM AI advocates sustainable corporate practices and proper corporate governance, which is essential for long-term shareholder value creation. We have set up our proxy voting platform with Broadridge in order to automate our process as much as possible. Our Voting activity report is available herein or refers to the regulatory information section of the website.

RAM AI's engagement focuses on companies that severely and structurally breach principles of the United Nations Global Compact in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption. The engagement may result in excluding a company from the investment universe of RAM AI or its clients. We believe that a constructive dialogue with the companies in which we and our clients invest is more effective than excluding companies from our investment universe. 

Recognising the value of different forms of engagement, RAM AI independently carries out individual engagements as well as collaborative engagements with other investors or institutions. 

For instance, we believe that the best way to promote improved market practices is through active membership in collaborative platforms such as The Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UN PRI), and Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), Access to Medicine Foundation, Climate Action 100+. For each of these platforms, RAM AI identifies and prioritises its collaborative engagement activities within these memberships. Whilst RAM AI might use such platforms for collaborative engagement, RAM AI will not outsource its engagement responsibilities to third parties.

Our portfolio holdings (and more broadly our investment universe) are screened on 1) validation of a breach of tour principles, 2) the severity of the breach and 3) the degree to which management can be held accountable for the issue. Engagements typically run over a three years period, during which we have regular contact with company representatives. When more than half of the engagement objectives have been achieved, we can close an engagement successfully. Whether we close an engagement case successfully or unsuccessfully, we share this information with the company.

More information is available in the Regulatory Information Section of the website.

The Exclusion list is applied to all Funds and has different levels of ESG commitments across RAM Art.8 and Art.9 Funds given their significant ESG integration. 

RAM AI will exclude a company when there is an important risk that it contributes to or is responsible for key ESG issues that RAM AI has identified as non-sustainable, in contradiction to RAM AI fundamental values or against international laws, norms and conventions. RAM only excludes securities and issuers on the long side of the book and continue to be able to short those names within the alternative strategies. 

Exclusion decision: the exclusion list is based both on data from external data providers and on RAM’s own in-house analysis of companies. Discretion to exclude a company lies with the RAM ESG-CSR Committee who asses the issue based on the basis of several criteria and issues identified. Ad-hoc criteria can be considered in certain cases.

After the assessment, if the excluded companies demonstrate improvements in their policies and business operations, they may be reinstated in RAM investable universe.

Basic non-exhaustive Exclusion list

Value Base Exclusion and ESG Exclusions (Systematic Equity Funds only)

The exclusions are applied on the criteria below when exceeding a threshold determined by RAM Active Investments SA. This threshold is lower in the case of strategies promoting ESG characteristics and/or with an ESG objective. The threshold usually refers to the revenue of the Company in that field.

In addition to the exclusion list maintained by our RAM AI SRI Committee, our investable universe of stocks is filtered initially to exclude harmful companies, a process assisted by our Natural-Language-Processing infrastructure that scans thousands of news each day on our investable universe to identify companies subject to ESG issues and controversies.