UBS clients raise $650 million for biggest yet biotech impact fund By Reuters

(Right spelling of title to Haefele from Heafele in seventh paragraph)

By Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi

ZURICH (Reuters) – UBS’s rich shoppers have raised $650 million for the most important biotechnology influence fund ever, the Swiss financial institution mentioned on Wednesday.

Impression investing – a time period coined in 2007 – grew out of the need to increase philanthropic objectives into mainstream monetary holdings.

Alongside monetary returns, influence investments goal to generate measurable environmental and social influence, usually in keeping with the United Nations Sustainable Improvement Targets (SDGs), which typically transcend the essential ideas of sustainable investing.

The Oncology Impression Fund 2, run by biotechnology funding agency MPM Capital, has raised a complete of $850 million, together with the $650 million obtained from UBS shoppers. It’ll make investments 80% of its capital into privately held start-ups, and the rest into public firms, creating progressive remedies for most cancers and different severe sicknesses.

Twenty % of the efficiency payment the managers earn off their investments, in addition to a portion of drug royalties, can be donated to enhance entry to most cancers therapy for youngsters within the creating world and to fund most cancers analysis, portfolio supervisor Christiana Bardon mentioned.

Along with its predecessor fund, for which MPM and UBS’s wealth administration raised over $470 million in 2016, it marks the Swiss financial institution’s largest single theme-focused influence funding fundraising to this point.

“With this fund, I really feel like we tried to reimagine the influence house. The imaginative and prescient right here remains to be extraordinarily daring, which is to say: What if each drug that was developed and bought had that 1% return to make the world a greater place?” Mark Haefele, chief funding officer for UBS Wealth Administration, mentioned.

“Once we began on this journey, influence investing was about influence bonds and on the time they had been being executed in $5 million increments. To launch one thing that’s 100 occasions the dimensions of that was very formidable, and reveals how this theme clearly resonates with our shoppers,” he added.

UBS, the world’s largest wealth supervisor, had raised $6.9 billion for SDG-related influence investments as of end-2020. It goals so as to add $70 billion of invested belongings categorized as influence investing or as sustainably centered investments extra broadly via 2025.

Whereas influence investing has usually been related to concessionary returns, the managers mentioned traders – which embody massive firms, insurers and different very rich people alongside UBS shoppers – wouldn’t must forgo returns, primarily based on the efficiency of the earlier fund.

“Our influence fund is as worthwhile as our different funds, and they’re typically prime quartile performers inside U.S. enterprise capital,” MPM Managing Director Ansbert Gadicke mentioned.

(This story corrects spelling of title to Haefele from Heafele in seventh paragraph)