Sustainability into Investments

Sustainability is the originator of our strategy, shaping the way the decisions are taken and leading Generali to be a generative and impact-driven Group, able to create shared value. We aim to deliver a positive social and environmental impact on stakeholders by integrating sustainability in core business and processes.

We are signatories of the United Nations Global Compact and the Principles for Responsible Investments (PRI) and for a number of years now we have been basing our investment strategies also on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) criteria, without sacrificing profitability. In addition, we have continued to uphold the principle of protecting our most sensitive asset: our reputation.

We are global institutional investors and we believe our investments have a significant impact on the real economy, allowing us to actively influence areas such as good governance practice of our investee’s companies, environmental protection and respect for human rights and labour rights.

Group investments play a central role in shaping and implementing the Group specific sustainability goals. To this extent, the investment strategy of the Group duly considers and incorporates relevant sustainability factors:

• which have been identified as material to the Group's strategy;
• which can expose the Group to material sustainability risk;
• driving investment opportunities by integrating specific sustainable investment objectives with financial objectives and targets.

Generali formalized its commitment to responsible investment since the 2006 trough dedicated Group Guidelines. The current Integration of Sustainability into Investments and Active Ownership Group Guideline defines the framework adopted by the Group to integrate ESG into investment decisions in relation to:

• Operating model, setting the role of the Asset Owner with delegated asset management activities;
• Governance, identifying the central role of the Group Responsible Investment Committee which comprises representatives of the main functions involved in investment management;
• ESG approaches applied to the relevant investment portfolios and across different asset classes;
• Active Ownership, defining voting principles embedding ESG consideration and engagement approach with investee companies to influence their ESG behaviours ad policies;
• Compliance with Sustainable Finance regulatory requirements.