Sustainability – ESG

Sustainability concerns us all. It is the awareness of the need to preserve natural resources such as clean water and clean air and to limit climate change as quickly and as far as possible. All our actions should be integrated and open to technology, but not dogmatically focused on these goals. This will protect current and future generations from harm and offer and/or leave them a world worth living in.

Not only international communities and individual countries, as well as their governments, institutions and citizens, must contribute to achieving these goals, but also companies from every economic and service sector.

The European Union has imposed regulations on its Member States regarding sustainability, including the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation and Taxonomy Regulation. These also affect us as wealth advisors and members or Partners of the Dachstein Group. These regulations identify three central responsibilities, under the acronym “ESG”: environmental protection, social sustainability and sustainable corporate governance.
Members and Partners of the Dachstein Group take sustainability extremely seriously and fulfill these legal obligations in close liaison with their joint umbrella company, FinanzAdmin Wertpapierdienstleistungen GmbH.

During the advisory process, we will determine whether sustainability criteria should be considered for the financial instruments required for every advisory and/or brokerage service. A number of financial instruments are available, each with a different focus. The financial instruments that consider sustainability aspects are divided into three categories:

Category A: those that involve ecologically sustainable financial instruments (according to the Taxonomy Regulation). This means that the economic activity of such a financial instrument serves at least one environmental goal and makes a significant contribution to achieving this target; simultaneously, the economic activity does not have a major negative impact on one or more of the environmental goals; the economic activity complies with the established minimum protection (concerning human and labor rights, corporate governance principles, etc.); and therefore meets the relevant technical specifications, measured by KPIs (e.g., emissions or carbon footprint thresholds).

The Taxonomy Regulation also identifies six environmental goals, namely:
• Climate protection
• Adapting to climate change
• The sustainable use and protection of water and marine resources
• The transition to a circular economy
• The avoidance and reduction of environmental pollution
• The conservation and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems

Category B: those that involve ecologically sustainable financial instruments (according to the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation).

Within Category B, i.e., financial instruments in accordance with the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, products are differentiated according to:
• Art 8 (also known as “light green”) and
• Art 9 (also known as “dark green”)

Products in accordance with Art 8 consider these ecological and social criteria, while those in accordance with Art 9 invest in companies that explicitly pursue these sustainability goals.

These sustainability aspects can be considered for a single financial instrument, or for an entire portfolio.
It should be noted, however, that no financial instrument fully complies with the requirements of Art 8 or Art 9, but only to a certain minimum extent.

Category C: those that involve ecologically sustainable financial instruments that do not fall under Categories A and B, but that consider various adverse impacts on sustainability factors.

As these are identified solely on the basis of information provided by product developers and external software suppliers, we are unable to verify this information based on our own research.

These sustainability aspects can be considered for a single financial instrument, or for an entire portfolio.

Financial instruments in accordance with Category C do not consider minimum percentage values, but rather whether a financial instrument addresses these goals or not.

If clients do not have any sustainability preferences, we classify them as “sustainability-neutral”. This means that we only include other investment preferences (e.g., risk tolerance, experience and expertise, financial circumstances) when assessing suitability and selecting which financial instruments we may recommend. In this case, sustainability is not a selection and/or exclusion criterion.

Remuneration for arranging financial products is not generally affected by potential sustainability risks.