The problem

A global ETF provider needed an Article 9 fund that would appeal to a wide range of clients — not the expensive, concentrated active strategies that dominated the Article 9 landscape, and not the broad passive Paris Aligned benchmarks that were too blunt an instrument. They needed something systematic, cost-efficient, and genuinely sustainable.

The challenges

  • Building a robust Sustainable Investment Framework from scratch.

  • Designing an SDG-based investment pillar that could allocate capital across social and environmental objectives simultaneously.

  • Implementing constraints to target desired outcomes without creating unwanted capacity limitations.

What we built

  • A fully systematic, passively managed Article 9 strategy built around the UN SDG framework, investing in approximately 100 companies with products or services that tackle climate change, social inequality, and natural capital protection.

  • A Sustainable Pillar framework that promotes style diversification across sustainable themes.

  • Factor controls to ensure the portfolio stays within tight active exposure bounds while targeting financial return alongside impact.

The outcome

A strategy that sits in genuinely uncrowded territory, between expensive active and blunt passive, with full SFDR Article 9 classification, systematic implementation, and a construction methodology the client could explain clearly to their own distribution network.

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