Integrated Impact Management

Most members of the impact management team are integrated into our investment teams to support across the deal cycle and lead impact-driven value creation initiatives. These team members bring technical expertise to each investment, whilst also facilitating a knowledge-sharing network across Bridges and with external parties. This coordinated ‘hub-and-spoke’ function enables us to operate our approach with consistency across strategies, whilst ensuring resource is dedicated to continuous improvement, ongoing industry engagement and market-building efforts.

Between 2016-2021, members of the Bridges team facilitated the Impact Management Project, working with industry leaders and standard-setters. This has given us a unique perspective on the evolution of best practice in this area.

Bridges’ own impact management approach is aligned with regulatory and industry principles and standards of practice, including the Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI). Building high-quality processes ensures our performance information is complete and accurate, which in turn helps us comply with regulation such as the EU’s SFDR.

We also support our investments to adopt corporate standards to ensure comparability of performance information: for example, using standardised disclosures and reporting frameworks (such as B Lab), alongside issue-specific thresholds and frameworks (such as the Science-Based Targets Initiative and the Taskforce for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)). We also refer to the OECD MNE guidelines and UN Global Compact for establishing processes and setting objectives.

For us, impact management is more than just collecting data about what our investments already do. We use data about an investment’s impacts on sustainability to take action, and we prioritise actions that result in the creation of value for all stakeholders. Indeed, understanding the complex relationship between impact and commercial considerations has been critical to building our integrated approach.

We are committed to learning and actively seek to improve our approach with each fund. This culture of improvement also enables us to adapt as the world around us also changes.

Greater market consistency – from shared definitions to integrated sustainability accounting standards – will ultimately enable more capital to flow towards a more inclusive and sustainable economy. We continually update our approach to adhere to these emerging standards, while sharing our approach and goals transparently.

In this evolving industry, we think it is important to use market-wide standards to execute on our strategy, rather than create a proprietary framework. The diagram below – based on the consensus agreed between standard-setters through the Impact Management Platform – shows the core features of our integrated impact management process (which is based on internationally agreed principles and standards) and how this translate into our investment goals.