The latest funds and investment activity from across the globe.

PIMCO
US bond giant PIMCO has added to its ESG range of funds. The GIS Emerging Markets Bond ESG fund offers dual access to the group’s emerging markets bond strategy and proprietary ESG scoring framework and portfolio construction. Yacov Arnopolin, executive vice president, Javier Romo, senior vice president, and Pramol Dhawan, managing director and global head of the emerging markets portfolio will manage the fund.
 
The fixed income specialist said that the fund will invest in a broad range of dollar-denominated bonds issued by emerging market sovereign and quasi-sovereign entities with tactical allocations in local currency. Additionally, it will be accessible in a variety of share classes in different currencies, depending on client requirements. “Investor demand for emerging market strategies with an ESG orientation continues to grow. Combining our emerging markets expertise with our proprietary ESG approach is the next logical step in the evolution of our emerging markets ESG solutions,” Pramol Dhawan said.

The group said that in shoring up its ESG offering, it has converted and renamed its PIMCO GIS Socially Responsible Emerging Markets Bond Fund into PIMCO GIS Emerging Markets Bond ESG Fund. The former was launched in 2010 and has approximately $680 million (£559 million) in net assets. While the SRI fund applied a pure exclusion list, the new converged fund would fully incorporate PIMCO’s ESG framework, the firm said.

Invesco
Head of EMEA ETFs at  Invesco Gary Buxton said: “Three of the biggest trends we have seen over the past decade are growing demand for multi-factor strategies, ESG investments and ETFs more generally,” announcing the launch of a multi-factor ETF on Monday. The Invesco Quantitative Strategies ESG Global Equity Multi-Factor UCITS ETF will incorporate “strict” ESG criteria and be actively managed by the Invesco quantitative strategies (IQS) team, the firm said.

It will include a portfolio of global equities that are screened on three investment factors: value (companies perceived to be inexpensive relative to market averages); quality (companies that demonstrate stronger balance sheets relative to market averages); and momentum (companies whose historical share price performance or earnings growth have exceeded market averages), the US investment house said. The fund will be rebalanced monthly and carries an annual ongoing fee of 0.60 per cent.

 “We believe this strategy could appeal to ESG-focused investors who want to capture the potential benefits of an increased exposure to factors and are not tightly constrained to traditional benchmarks. We use a proprietary risk model to manage the sector, country, currency and stock-specific exposures with a view to retain only those risks for which we believe the investor should be rewarded,” Manuela von Ditfurth, IQS senior portfolio manager at Invesco, said.