Van Lanschot Kempen Investment Management

Speakers: Daniel Whitaker, Senior Associate Client Management InstituitionsJorrit Arissen, Co-head Real Assets

At Van Lanschot Kempen our credit team take an active approach to investing and engagement with companies is  part of this active approach. The aim here is to deliver results and to help clients navigate through the transitions to a more sustainable economy/world. Today, we would like to talk about  a specific engagement case handled by the credit team, to illustrate how this approach works. The Euro Credit strategy has been invested in Volkswagen since 2008. But the company is not blemish free and has had several sustainability issues, most important of which is the emissions scandal referred to as “diesel gate”.  Van Lanschot Kempen decided not to divest Volkswagen bonds for all its portfolio’s, but rather to engage with the company. Why did we choose to engage, and has this engagement paid off?  Moderator:Loes Wingens - Head of Wholesale, Wholesale & Institutional ClientsSpeakers:Alex Hunger - Member of the Investor relations team of VolkswagenLizelle du Plessis- Director Fixed Income Portfolio / Fund Management

As active managers, we believe in engaging with the companies that we invest in to drive the transition to a sustainable economy. Whether it’s equity investing or credit investing, we believe steady engagement can drive real life change. Listen to our latest podcast to learn the rationale behind this, what we ask the companies that we engage with, how we choose between investing or divesting and how we track the effectiveness of our engagements.Moderator:Daniel Whitaker- Senior Associate, Institutional Investment TeamSpeakers:Danny Decker- Lead sustainability expertLizelle du Plessis- Director Fixed Income Portfolio / Fund Management

The pensions world – and indeed the broader investment world – has essentially sleepwalked into their exposure to the Russian Ukraine war. War as a real and near-term geopolitical risk between major economies was thought to be too far-fetched. But beyond the immediacy of war, there is a broader problem of investors having exposure to government which treat their own society poorly to an alarming degree, and we would say unacceptable degree. Kempen designed a framework scoring each country in our universe for a range of E, S and G factors which fit the values we believe are core to our clients’ beliefs, and their underlying beneficiaries. In this podcast we discuss the necessity of having such a framework and how it can help investors to engage on the governance of a major country.

Inflation – last year 2.7% in Europe – creeping up may not have kept you awake last year as the market believed it was transitory. Now it's 8.1% ; as an investor it’s a concern that we can’t ignore.As investors we’re looking for inflation protection.Infra is mentioned as providing inflation protection, but let’s dig into that – we can see it doing well while the inflation concerns are here – one of the few strategies up while the market is down.In this podcast we will tackle the question: how inflation proof is Infrastructure really and where do we, as investors, need to look out for?  

In this podcast Ian Brown, James Mullins and Nicholas Clapp consider some of the things that trustees need to think about as their scheme approaches its endgame and explain why Kempen is well placed to accompany you on your journey. Listen to the podcast!