“It is no secret that we at BlackRock have embraced sustainability rather late. The turnaround came with top executive Larry Fink’s letters to shareholders about creating long-term value, then purpose, and then sustainability in 2020. But I think we can say that we are now serving our clients well in this area,” said Monique Donders, who has been the country manager of BlackRock Netherlands since 2017, which, with more than €300 billion in client assets under management, is the group’s second-largest country organisation in Europe after the UK.
“The Netherlands more or less has a status apart in the global organisation of the world’s largest asset manager, because many developments take place in the Netherlands earlier than in other countries” said Donders (pictured. She was specifically referring to themes such as retrocessions, fiduciary management and sustainability.
Donders gave this explanation in an interview with Fondsnieuws, the Dutch sister platform of Investment Officer Luxembourg. According to Donders, BlackRock was relatively late in the field of sustainability compared to, for example, European asset managers.
“That is because we are a global player, serving clients where these kinds of developments take place at different speeds. With our country organisations in Europe and EMEA, we have long argued that sustainability is very important in our part of the world and that we should take a good look at it. For a long time it was less alive in the United States, but there we have made this leap of faith, so that we have now fully embraced it.”
For example, BlackRock is now “by far” the largest provider of sustainable ETFs globally and almost half of the inflows into UCITS funds go into sustainable strategies, Donders said. “We have been able to develop quickly, thanks to our scale and clout,” she said.
“We don’t want to alienate clients”
In response to the comment that BlackRock still offers products based on so-called “grey” benchmarks in addition to ETFs based on green benchmarks, and that this raises questions in the public mind about the house’s intrinsic motivation in terms of responsible investing, she responded: “It is indeed, given the size of BlackRock, that we offer a little bit of everything. We try to offer clients choice so as not to alienate them from us. What we do try to do is transfer a lot of knowledge. In it, we make it clear why we choose sustainability. That is because we see climate change as an investment risk.”
An executive committee was set up two years ago, in which all country organisations in continental Europe work together and share knowledge and experience. Thanks to this body, explained Donders, a stronger voice can be heard vis-à-vis the headquarters in New York in order to draw more attention to certain themes, such as sustainability.
Secret diaries
In that context, Donders says that she does not disagree with “some of the criticism” from Tariq Fancy. This former BlackRock employee recently stated in his “Secret Diaries” that “ESG is in danger of becoming a social placebo that reduces the chance of the real reforms that the world needs being carried out”. Donders said that she agrees with Fancy’s view that the principle in a successful climate transition is ‘no rules, no game’.
She therefore welcomes the European SFDR directive, which must make it clear which (sustainable) criteria investment products meet. “In Europe there is already a lot of regulation in place, which should counteract “greenwashing”. We must avoid a proliferation of all kinds of labels, because then it will become a mess and that is not good for the sector either.