Our priorities in 2025
As we reflect on the past year, I’m pleased to showcase in this report the ways that ICG has continued to embed responsible investing principles across our asset classes and strategies. We view sustainability matters as integral to effective risk management, as well as potential drivers of opportunity – and we have spent the last year working to grow and strengthen our systems for scale; further integrating sustainability considerations into our investment process from pre-investment diligence; to engagement with sponsors, financial partners, and management teams; to ongoing monitoring and measurement of progress on key sustainability KPIs.
The rapidly expanding and shifting regulatory environment facing our clients and our portfolio companies has required us to place ever more attention on sustainability data collection and management, and on harmonising our requests for information with industry frameworks and forthcoming regulatory standards. This past year, we have taken important steps to partner with IT and data analytics teams within ICG to further strengthen our capabilities around data collection and analysis; a theme which will continue in the months and years to come.
We have also focused on embedding the use of our bespoke materiality assessment tool, SPOTlight, into our pre-investment assessment approach across strategies. Where we are able to better identify material risks in potential investments, we can not only help to protect the investments of our clients, but also identify areas where we can focus our engagement efforts post investment, supporting companies with a variety of efforts such as building operational resilience, strengthening their workforces, seeking out cost savings related to decarbonising their business models, and unlocking potential opportunities for value protection and enhancement.
Looking ahead
In the year ahead, we will continue our work to strengthen our capabilities and embrace systems that allow us to scale our integration of sustainability considerations across a growing range of ICG products.
In particular, we will be focused on expanding data-driven intelligence – on an asset-level basis as well as portfolio-wide. Our proprietary materiality tool is helping to tailor engagement strategies to each company’s unique context, ensuring efforts are salient and commercially relevant. We will also seek to gather more strategic intelligence from across our own portfolio and more than a decade of responsible investing experience, to share valuable sector-level and thematic sustainability information with investment teams and portfolio companies.
We view sustainability matters as integral to effective risk management, as well as potential drivers of opportunity – and we have spent the last year working to grow and strengthen our systems for scale; further integrating sustainability considerations into our investment process from pre-investment diligence; to engagement with sponsors, financial partners, and management teams; to ongoing monitoring and measurement of progress on key sustainability KPIs.
As regulatory expectations evolve and investor demand for transparency grows ever more, we will continue to focus on data quality and streamline reporting to support clients and other stakeholders with decision-useful information. A particular area of analytical focus will be on more detailed assessment of climate-related risk. We know physical and transition risks can pose material challenges for investments, and we will seek to leverage available resources to strengthen our analysis and monitoring capabilities.
We look forward to another year of partnership between ICG’s Sustainability team and investment teams, and with sponsors and management teams, to continue integrating meaningful, useful analysis and consideration of sustainability factors across our investment landscape.
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