As our ESG Lead, I am delighted to share our third Sustainable Investment report. You can read the full report HERE.
With our recent exit and reinvestment into leading ethical jewellery brand Monica Vinader, we are seeing increased evidence that sustainability is not only the right thing to do but it also drives profits. We are particularly proud to work with sectors like jewellery, travel, and hospitality that are not traditionally seen as sustainable, but are actively working to change that while still demonstrating substantial financial growth.
Becoming a certified B Corp
In 2022, Piper became a certified B Corp. With its rigorous assessment process, B Corp rewards positive impact – the more action the business takes, the more points you receive. The actions we took to achieve certification range from legally amending our business purpose to consider all stakeholders, people and planet, in our decisions, swapping to a zero-to-landfill waste provider, new charity partnerships, all the way to filling our office with sustainable snacks, stationary and cleaning products.
B Corps all have a shared purpose in reducing their impact, but that isn’t the only reason we’re increasingly choosing to invest in B Corps and sustainable businesses. 2021 data from B Corp shows that B Corps have a faster growth in turnover versus non-B Corps (27% vs 5%), making them great investments.
Taking Responsibility for Our Emissions
With our partner, Carbon Responsible, we are very proud to have spent 2022 developing our GHG emissions reporting process. In this report, we are sharing our portfolio emissions for the first time, as well as a breakdown by sector and the potential cost to our portfolio when taxation comes in. This is important to highlight why carbon reporting is not only a way of accounting your impact, but also preparing businesses for future risks and costs.
While we work on reduction, we also wanted to take responsibility for the emissions we are still making. With offsetting becoming an increasingly dirty word, we researched and spoke to experts to try and find a solution that had a truly positive impact. Rather than purchasing carbon credits through a middle man, we have chosen to partner with a climate impact charity, Cool Earth, and donate directly to projects that protect our natural environment.
Bettering our community
Beyond our internal and portfolio work, we are also keenly aware of the impacts of the investment community and want to be a force for good within it. We have worked to understand the UN SDGs we can have the largest positive impact on and our annual portfolio KPIs evidence this impact.
- SDG 5, Gender Equality – 46% of senior leadership across the portfolio is female.
- SDG 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth – our portfolio has created nearly 500 jobs this year and they have an avg. eNPS of 32 which is considered great.
- SDG 12, Responsible Consumption & production – 90% have circularity, reuse or recycling systems.
- SDG 13, Climate Action – 90% of the portfolio does GHG emissions reporting.
Data transparency
We present our portfolio KPI data with a focus on transparency and unifying that data with the wider industry. This year we signed up with and reported our data to the European Data Convergence Initiative, which aims to use standardisation of ESG metrics to build a meaningful picture of performance from private companies. While we work to constantly improve our portfolio’s performance, these KPIs show both the positive and the negative, reflecting the growth and changing brands in our portfolio.
We always want to learn and do better, so if you have any thoughts or questions, please get in touch.
Dan Stern
Partner & ESG Lead