PIMCO
Asset manager

Who we are

PIMCO is a global leader in active fixed income with deep expertise across public and private markets. We invest our clients’ capital across a range of fixed income and credit opportunities, leveraging our decades of experience navigating complex debt markets. Our flexible capital base and deep relationships with issuers have helped us become one of the world’s largest providers of traditional and nontraditional solutions for companies that need financing and investors who seek strong risk-adjusted returns.

Investment Leadership Our portfolio management team is headed by our CIOs, but investment decision-making is a team effort, drawing upon the skills and insights of portfolio managers and analysts around the globe.

PIMCO’s position in the Netherlands

The Dutch market is an important market for PIMCO, as we have been managing assets for Dutch pension funds, insurance companies, family offices and banks for over 35 years. Clients in the Netherlands have entrusted PIMCO with assets of around €10 billion, which is invested in a broad range of investment strategies including global and core bond strategies, credit, emerging market debt, private debt and LDI. Our Dutch client base is supported by four dedicated account managers, who are well known with the local client developments and challenges, including reporting, regulation (amongst which FTK, Wet Toekomst Pensioen), LDI and ESG investing.

For strategic questions about risk management, portfolio optimization, scenario analysis, LDI etc, the team works closely with the PIMCO Solutions and Analytics team based in EMEA. PIMCO is therefore able to support clients in both asset management and strategic advice, which is part of our broader client servicing.

The Netherlands is part of the broader Benelux Team, headed by Patrick Dunnewolt. Jeroen van van Bezooijen and Vincent Groenewoud are dedicated account managers in the Institutional team, while Phil Michels is responsible for our Wealth Management Business in the Netherlands.

ESG developments

PIMCO has managed socially responsible investments since 1989 and has built out a dedicated sustainability mutual fund platform. In addition, PIMCO has built our ESG research capabilities over the past 10+ years with proprietary scoring frameworks built across major fixed income asset classes. PIMCO generally incorporates the consideration of ESG factors into our broad investment research process when evaluating the long-term ESG risks and opportunities of issuers, where applicable. In 2021, PIMCO scored strongly amongst signatory peers and received five-star scores across four of five relevant PRI modules, reflecting the strength of our firm-wide ESG integration.

Recent ESG Improvements and Initiatives

At PIMCO, we are focused on evolving and enhancing our sustainability processes and capabilities. PIMCO’s ESG Leadership team provides strategic guidance for further developing the firm’s sustainability thinking and capabilities. The group sets objectives and evaluates initiatives and priorities on a continuous basis throughout the year. Similar to the long-term orientation of PIMCO’s investment process, the firm’s ESG Leadership team establishes long-term strategic objectives. Please see below for key recent sustainability milestones:

·        Expanded climate risk framework – PIMCO has dedicated resources to build out proprietary, portfolio-level climate scenario analysis tools, and has also expanded climate risk coverage beyond corporates and sovereigns to include capabilities in the US municipals space. PIMCO leverages comprehensive climate risk data provider risQ to help provide actionable insights geared toward better assessing physical risks’ effects on public debt.

·        Thematic ESG engagements – PIMCO’s ESG analyst team has pursued targeted, thematic engagement efforts across a range of issuers focused on topics such as the adverse climate effects of methane emissions, portfolio emissions and Paris Agreement alignment in the financials industry, deforestation, nutrition, and modern slavery and human rights throughout business models and supply chains.

·        Defined sustainability considerations in Alternative Investments – We formalized our approach to the consideration of ESG factors where relevant in private market transactions, and established an ESG Alts Advisory Group.

Recent ESG Process Changes 

As a firm, we continue to enhance proprietary tools to assess, manage, and help mitigate ESG related risks in our portfolios, and to harness potential opportunities in the evolving market landscape. This framework helps us, among other things, to decrease portfolio exposure to financial risks brought about by climate change and reduce the overall exposure to activities contributing to global warming. To aid this process, PIMCO continues to invest in our sustainability Platform by hiring global teammates to help supplement our broad work streams. PIMCO’s sustainability team now spans 50+ investment professionals specifically responsible for building the sustainability platform. 

While we have not had significant changes in PIMCO’s time-tested investment process in the past 12-36 months, we are constantly evolving and improving our ESG processes and capabilities, through building proprietary scoring systems, improving our ESG research coverage across asset classes and hiring industry experts. Over the last 12-36 months, we have designed and implemented enhanced ESG evaluation capabilities, including robust proprietary tools to assess, manage, and help mitigate climate-related risks in our clients’ portfolios. For example, PIMCO has developed a climate risk scoring methodology that evaluates sectors’ exposure to climate risk over cyclical, secular and super-secular time horizons. We have also built climate scenario and stress-test models, to predict and estimate the impact of different transition scenarios on various financial indicators. We also formalised our approach to ESG integration in the alternative investments space, and launched ESG strategies across the flexible, diversified credit and emerging market asset classes.

On the engagement front: at a firm level PIMCO continues to expand our intensive ESG engagement initiatives with issuers around the world, spanning corporations, sovereigns, municipalities and others. We believe strongly that an active engagement platform can deliver change and deliver value for our investors. In 2022, PIMCO’s global team of 80+ credit research analysts engaged with 1,370 corporate bond issuers across industries and regions on sustainability topics.  PIMCO’s credit and ESG research analysts engage with the companies that they cover, discussing topics with company management teams related to corporate strategy, leverage, and balance sheet management, as well as sustainability-related topics such as climate change targets and environmental plans, human capital management, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and board qualifications and composition. We have also progressed our engagement efforts across different asset classes including sovereigns, and municipals: PIMCO’s municipals credit research team has been dedicated to expanding their municipal issuer engagement efforts and also plays an active role with the Milken Public Finance Advisory Committee and PRI Sub-Sovereign Debt Advisory Committee. In sum, PIMCO continues to build on our engagement efforts, aiming to reach more issuers and have more meaningful engagements using our improved technology and engagement framework. Finally on engagement, PIMCO’s ESG Technology team has developed proprietary tools to help ESG analysts track issuer engagements on sustainability issues. Our proprietary systems seeks to capture the latest information on issuers’ forward-looking strategy to manage sustainability and positive impact factors. These tools also provide aggregated reporting on ESG engagement priorities. Working with the credit research team, the ESG analyst team uses these tools to track the progress of our engagement efforts (e.g., industry-specific questionnaires, company calls and in-person meetings) based on sustainability themes, including progress milestones and follow-ups. 

PIMCO Europe Ltd (London)

PIMCO Europe GmbH (Germany)