BlueBay’s Andrzej Skiba, Head of US Credit, on his experience of working closely with an ESG team
Do you work closely with BlueBay's specialist ESG team?
Andrzej: We engage with them on a daily basis. So for example, all the proprietary ESG checkups on individual credits that we invest in are executed in a partnership between the analyst responsible for the credit, and the ESG team. Our ESG team, initially part of the firm's risk function, has now been integrated into the investment function.
So there is a ton of dialogue happening between those groups and we want to integrate them into our day-to-day investment activities as much as is physically possible. I'm involved in the ESG steering group at BlueBay and we're continually looking at how we can further integrate ESG into day-to-day work. And at how we can offer solutions to our clients that take advantage of the hard work we've put into developing our ESG capability to where it is right now.
Do you spend a lot of time discussing ESG issues during the investment process?
Andrzej: Absolutely. Whenever we're discussing credit stories for investment, ESG is liable to come up. And when we communicate our views on individual credits using our internal cloud-based decision tool, ESG considerations are part of that assessment as well. So ESG is not a separate exercise - it's an integral part of the investment exercise that we perform for each investment.
Could you describe a recent theme you've discussed with the ESG analysts?
Andrzej: We've been discussing deforestation in Brazil and how some of the Brazilian meat producers - big issuers in the global high yield benchmark - might have contributed to that deforestation. We discussed how BlueBay can engage with companies in the sector and have reached out as a result. So for us this is not just about determining the course of action for our investments, but also about engaging with individual issuers.
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