It’s not every day you deal with one of the biggest names in the NBA when it comes to investing. But that’s what I happily did on a sunny sunny day in Milwaukee last week.
The world knows that Milwaukee Bucks power forward Giannis Antetokounmpo is a force to be reckoned with on the basketball court (two consecutive NBA MVP awards, for example). However, Antetokounmpo is also focused on leveling the playing field in investing and is starting a new venture with Wall Street veteran John Koudounis, chairman and CEO of Calmos Investments. It’s called the Calamos Antetokounmpo Sustainable Equity Funds, which is a suite of ESG funds.
“We put money together and formed a separate company,” Koudounis told me in an exclusive joint interview with Frodert and Antetokounmpo at the Medical College of Wisconsin Sports Science Center, the Bucks training facility. “We’re fifty-fifty, John and I,” Antetokounmpo said.
“We are doing three different funds so that we can reach different levels of investors,” Koudounis said. He added that this is not just something that big funds can get involved in.
Antetokounmpo was born and raised in Athens, Greece, after his parents moved there from Lagos, Nigeria. He worked hard to make ends meet. But her parents didn’t have access to investments and didn’t feel safe trusting others with their money, she told me. This is one reason why she is passionate about accessibility and financial literacy. (You can read more about Antetokounmpo’s investing journey and how the ESG Fund will work here.)
To say that ESG investing has picked up is an understatement. According to Bloomberg analysis, global ESG assets could reach $53 trillion by 2025. and growth in ESG investment products outpaced all other segments of the asset management industry in 2021, Luck informed of.
Meanwhile, ESG initiatives have been a common theme in many C-suites. And business leaders like Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, have been pushing for the past few years to bring ESG investing into the mainstream. Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, is another official who is an advocate of ESG measures. Bank no. No. 1 on Just Capital’s 2023 list of America’s Most Just Companies. This is a first for Bank of America. How a company invests in using sustainable materials and reducing environmental impact, providing fair wages, worker protections and support for communities are just some of the factors considered to earn a spot on the list.
“To insiders, it was always clear that Moynihan was one of the leaders of the movement,” Luck’Peter Vanham wrote in The Impact Report that Moynihan was “the driving force behind ‘Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics’, a World Economic Forum initiative aimed at rallying companies around the world behind common ESG reporting.”
However, detractors argue that there is a lack of standardized criteria for what makes investing sustainable, which in turn complicates measuring the ESG performance of companies and funds.
With respect to ESG and the “e” in regulation, public companies are still awaiting passage of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed mandatory climate-risk disclosure rule. Megyn Thwing Eastman, MSCI’s managing director and global ESG editorial director, recently told me that increased regulation is one of the ESG trends CFOs should be watching for in 2023.
Thwing Eastman said, “We are following the fact that the focus on climate and ESG has really shifted in a lot of organizations over the past few years.” “So it’s not just [corporate social responsibility] People or sustainability people or even investor relations people—it’s finance people.
see you tomorrow.
Sherrill Estrada
[email protected]
big deal
KPMG’s Fourth Annual CTO Outlook Examines how top executives are navigating the macroenvironment. The findings are based on a survey of 300 CTOs from companies across all major industries with revenues of $2 billion or more. Eighty-three percent of respondents plan to use outsourcing, co-sourcing, or managed services models in the next three years. CTOs surveyed ranked ESG (38%), regulatory (36%), and geopolitical (33%) risk as the top three threats to the tax organization. Related risks—supply chain change (30%) and operational risk (30%) tie for fourth place, the report found. According to KPMG, all have inherent tax costs that must be carefully navigated. Respondents said a top agenda item is helping their companies understand the tax implications of international events and their consequences.
going deep
The “Global Corporate Credit ESG Engagement Report,” posted on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, argues that asset managers who leverage their relationships with issuers are better equipped to manage ESG risks and take advantage of ESG opportunities. are in the best position. The authors write, “Direct issuer engagement as an important tool for mitigating portfolio risks while generating long-term sustainable returns”.
leaderboard
Tina Hallqviston cfo volvo group, is resigning from her role with immediate effect. Hultkvist has served as CFO since March 2022 and has 25 years of experience at Volvo Group. Jan Ytterberg, previously Volvo Group CFO and currently in the role of Senior Advisor to Volvo Group, will step down as Acting CFO. Hultkvist will remain available to the company throughout 2023 to support the transition. Volvo Group has started the recruitment process for a successor.
Dennis L Laraway was named CFO in Cleveland Clinic, a health system, effective March 13. Since 2017, Larave has served as EVP and CFO at Banner Health, a health system based in Phoenix that operates 32 hospitals. Previously, Laraway held CFO positions at Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston; Scott & White Healthcare in Temple, Texas; St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix; and Seton Health System, formerly a member of Ascension Health in Troy, NY
overheard
“We are a small group of people and we need a lot of input into this system and a lot of input that goes beyond the technologies – certainly the regulators and the governments and everybody else.”
—Mira Murati, chief technology officer at OpenAI, the enterprise behind ChatGPT Time in an interview.
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