Stockholm (NordSIP) – Dedicated sustainable options within the realm of private debt are few and far between. This week, the family got a little bigger as M&G’s private assets division launched a sustainable senior secured loan fund. According to the press release, the new strategy is designed to give institutional investors access to private credit’s best-in-class companies from an environmental, social and governance (ESG) perspective. The M&G Sustainable Loan Fund boasts an explicit sustainability objective alongside its financial one. To deliver on those, an experienced duo of managers, Fiona Hagdrup and Thomas Lane, is backed by a 23-members-strong leveraged finance team with a long track record in loan investing as well as extensive firm-wide sustainability and stewardship resources.
The fund is seeded with a 175 million Euros investment from the Prudential With-Profits Fund. In addition, the Swedish government employees’ pension fund, Kåpan Pensioner, has committed an initial 26 million Euros to the strategy. NordSIP reached out to Marie Giertz, CIO of Kåpan Pensioner, and Robert Heaney, Head of Nordics at M&G, to hear more about their cooperation around the new venture.
“Sourcing sustainable fixed income products in general, and private debt in particular, is not easy, even if things are moving forward,” comments Giretz. “We have been investing with M&G for a long time now and are very happy with the cooperation. They have always been responsive to our need for incorporating sustainability in all our investments, including the fixed income portfolio. Moreover, the way M&G and Kåpan work with various ESG criteria is a good match,” she adds.
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