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IMD Sustainability Report 2020 ’s influence

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VidaCaixa: Accelerating its sustainable investment agenda

What does it mean to invest responsibly and sustainably today? And how can a long-standing institution like VidaCaixa, the insurance arm of Spain’s CaixaBank, continue to lead its market, sharpen its responsible value proposition and translate this to its customers? Faced with challenges such as rapidly changing ESG regulation, increased calls for transparency, and the strong sense of responsibility that comes from insuring people’s future, VidaCaixa partnered with Professor Vanina Farber and Victoria Kemanian, Director Business Transformation Initiative, to explore sustainable and responsible investment principles as a cornerstone of its strategy, organization and culture. While responsible investment is not new to VidaCaixa, the institution’s top leadership is determined to advance its agenda and strengthen its position as a leader in this field. According to Jordi Balcells Santaloria, Head of Socially Responsible Investment and Strategy “we have been deepening sustainability in the field of investment management for more than 15 years where important achievements have beenmade. I was delighted to co-design with IMD and participate in this training aimed at spreading these concepts throughout the whole organization. Many issues on ESG are straightforward but others are a real challenge for us and for the life insurance sector, so we will have to be pioneers.” The project goals were two fold. First, to build an aligned view on the key choices and options for VidaCaixa in refining its priorities for sustainable investment principles. Second, to further embed and accelerate the incorporation of ESG into its operations, ways of working and culture. VidaCaixa strategy aims to “walk the talk” by deploying resources to engage the organization around a common purpose, and to build a sustainable strategy and an innovative investment portfolio of products. To that end, VidaCaixa gathered its top 50 leaders over a series of workshops to reflect on what it means to lead the sustainable investment field when regulation will force laggards to step up. The sessions were structured around inspiration, inside-out and outside-in workshops. The IMD teamstarted the dialogue by looking at material ESG issues for the insurance sector and VidaCaixa aligning these key issues with selected priority UN Sustainable Development Goals along with scenario planning

to build a framework to speed and scale change, defining a common roadmap. The second part of the workshop focused on developing an action plan that broke silos and determined the short andmidtermpriorities, activities, resources, skills and the organizational model to succeed. Carmen Gimeno, Deputy General Manager, commented: “Our goal is to accelerate our work on sustainable investment in line with a reflection on our purpose, which has its roots in our social mission of ensuring our clients’ financial safety. This is an important responsibility for us, as the future of our clients depends on our best management. Therefore, we wanted to use this opportunity to distill and formulate this purposemore clearly, understand its essence and translate it into better propositions. We are fully intentional about this initiative and wanted tomake it visible within and outside our organization. Themarket is showingmomentumand there is a strong call for action. We believe we have a strong role to play in leading our industry in this transformation.”

Image: Professor Vanina Farber.