Case study: How Julius Baer works with its clients and customers to encourage sustainable practices

Stakeholder identification and consultation

Please describe which stakeholders (or groups/ types of stakeholders) you have identified, consulted, engaged, collaborated or partnered with for the purpose of implementing the Principles and improving your bank’s impacts. This should include a high-level overview of how your bank has identified relevant stakeholders, what issues were addressed/results achieved and how they fed into the action planning process.

Julius Baer connects with important stakeholder groups through both strategic efforts, such as its materiality assessment and strategic framework initiatives, and through ad hoc interactions on specific material issues. The stakeholders engaged include clients, employees, investors, communities, regulators, and industry and sustainability organisations.

For further details, please see the corresponding section in Julius Baer’s Sustainability Report, which provides an overview of how Julius Baer identified its key stakeholders and the issues that were addressed.

How did Julius Baer work with its clients and customers to encourage sustainable practices and enable sustainable economic activities?

In its 2023 Sustainability Report Julius Baer reports that it works with its clients and customers to encourage sustainable practices and enable sustainable economic activities as follows:

Julius Baer provides a variety of services designed to help clients enhance their ESG insights and promote sustainable practices, including through the Wealth Matters initiative. The firm has established a Sustainability Circle, comprising like-minded clients interested in ESG issues, which offers various activities aimed at sharing ESG best practices, leveraging its internal Next Generation research expertise.

In 2022, Julius Baer started to deliver ESG client reports to foster client engagement through transparent information regarding the ESG and climate dimensions of their portfolios. These reports include a breakdown of ESG categories for complete portfolios and individual asset classes, detailing the proportions of sustainable, responsible, and traditional investments, along with associated ESG risks. They also feature Julius Baer’s proprietary ‘theme’ scores, insights on controversies, and an MSCI ESG rating for comparison, rankings of ESG leaders and laggards, the largest positions, and in-depth climate metrics for the portfolio. The reports present a comprehensive overview at the aggregate portfolio level as well as at the asset class and instrument levels. Additionally, Julius Baer supports client voting through its sustainability voting initiative, encompassing companies in the energy sector.

The reputational risk guidelines established by Julius Baer for social and environmental risk serve to identify business activities with the potential for significant negative impacts, such as those involving thermal coal, palm oil, forestry, environmental degradation, and human rights violations. These guidelines offer a consistent framework for proactively addressing these risks within existing approval processes, particularly concerning client relationships.

UN Principles for Responsible Banking: Accelerating a positive global transition for people and the planet

With over 300 signatory banks representing almost half of the global banking industry, the Principles for Responsible Banking are the world’s foremost sustainable banking framework. Through these Principles, the banking community takes action to align core strategies, decision-making, lending and investment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and international agreements such as the Paris Climate Agreement.

FBRH Principles for Responsible Banking (PRB) Assurance:

First class PRB assurance services: The result of solid, hands-on ESG/ Sustainability experience

• • • FBRH is a GRI Certified Training Partner (Global), ISEP Training Centre and a member of CPD.
    • FBRH builds trust. Over 200 reviews from top professionals from around the world demonstrate our ability to build strong, trusting business relationships.
    • FBRH possesses a unique skill set that combines ESG/sustainability certified training, experience in advisory services and report preparation, and ESG/sustainability report assurance.

The combination of all the above empowers FBRH to provide first class Principles for Responsible Banking (PRB) assurance services.

References:

This case study is based on published information by Julius Baer, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original please revert to the following link:

https://www.juliusbaer.com/fileadmin/publications/julius-baer-sustainability-report-2023.pdf

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