At Sagemount, we have a fiduciary duty to deliver returns for our investors and our portfolio company partners. Furthermore, we believe that all our Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)-informed initiatives create value and achieve risk-adjusted returns on investment to us and our portfolio companies in the growing end markets that we engage in.
As a signatory of Principles for Responsible Investing (PRI), we actively engage our portfolio companies to ensure best-practice approaches in responsible investment during our ownership.
At its simplest, Responsible Investing refers to how businesses consider non-financial factors, such as environmental issues, social impacts, and good governance practices, within their operations, products produced and services provided.
We employ the “Sagemount Sustainability Standard”, our proprietary assessment methodology, focused on robust diligence of prospective investments on the following areas: governance practices, data privacy and security, diverse and engaged employees; and carbon emissions impact.
The Standard, based on industry good practices and evolving regulatory standards assess and monitors portfolio company performance throughout the investment period to help, build resilience, and enhance their exit positioning.
Our Responsible Investing and Growth Factors teams engage with our portfolio companies to help achieve alignment with the “Sagemount Sustainability Standard” during our holding period. The Standard requires companies to improve performance and achieve targets across four areas. In addition to achieving the Standard and on select investments, our team performs deep dive assessments on strategic ESG opportunities that have higher potential for value creation.
Implementing policies, procedures, and controls to ensure better privacy and security management
Ensuring best-practice approaches to ethics and compliance
Ensuring employee welfare and promoting a diverse and inclusive workforce
Setting science-based climate reduction targets for companies who want to engage on this initiative to support the transition to a lower carbon economy
Where there is a more direct link to develop sustainable product offerings to grow revenue and business, we invest alongside our portfolio companies via the Bregal Sustainable Development Financing Program. This is a €50 million fund, providing loans with attractive terms to portfolio companies to fund environmental, social and governance improvement projects.
Such loans may seek improvement within the company’s own operations such as renewable energy projects, upstream in the supply chain or downstream at the customer level.
Connectria, a Sagemount portfolio company and a market leader in cloud solution services aims to minimize the industry's environmental impact while providing customers with the highest-quality service. Energy is a central component for data center across the globe and the industry is predicted to account for 14% of total worldwide carbon emissions. A loan issued to Connectria from The Sustianable Development Loan Program, supported by COFRA, enabled 1.4GWh of annual energy savings and emissions reductions of at least 1,500 tCO2e per year.
Sagemount actively contributes to supporting local communities through the Bregal Helps Initiative - a €3 million COVID-19 relief fund established in 2020 to help communities affected by the pandemic.
Going forward, the initiative will continue to support the most vulnerable in our communities with the overarching mission to provide equal opportunities for all.
