NORWAY - State Street Global Advisors won a NOK570m (€69.3m) SRI mandate with the Bærum municipality in Norway.

"SRI is becoming more and more important especially in Nordic regions and what we see there is that most of the institutions mainly pension funds do have some SRI criteria which they do apply to their management portfolio," said State Street's Nordic market managing director Benoit Fally.

"The most common way to do it is by excluding some stocks of the portfolio and what we have done in order to cope with that trend is two things we are offering active strategies and passive strategies."

For Bærum, State Street will be managing a passive global SRI mandate. The benchmark is 50% Europe, 30% US and 20% Far East.

"On the passive side we basically replicate the indices which clients use excluding some stocks depending on the criteria they want."

This is either done by investing in State Street's existing ethically screened UCITS Balzac fund or by managing a separate portfolio if clients cannot go into funds because of restrictions.

For active mandates State Street has teamed up with a company called Innovest.

"They provide us with a set of criteria which allow us to basically invest into companies which have a sustainable business model we basically do add 2-3% of alpha to European equity benchmarks using sustainable criteria among others," Fally said. 

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