Investment Mandate
Investment Mandate is a set of parameters and guidelines laying out how a pool of assets should be invested, intended inform the decisions of an investment manager. They typically include instructions on the investor’s priorities and goals, with benchmarks for performance, acceptable levels of risk for individual asset categories, and possibly types of funds to be either prioritized or avoided for e.g. ESG reasons. Focussing Capital Long Term, a group of leading international institutional investors and their advisers published a proposal in 2018 setting out the features needed, if institutional investors were to apply a model investment mandate that would ensure that time horizons, incentives and goals of investment managers fully aligned with those of the owners of the invested assets, where those of the latter are long term, while the former may be short term. Operational Excellence Opagio reporting could add important measured dimensions to three of the ten drivers featured in the proposal: Performance Report, Disclosures and Active Ownership. Asset managers would require any company, in which an investment was made or to which loan funding were extended, to have and to share concrete systematic operational reporting. This could in turn be shared with the institutional investor, to monitor how aligned the operating strategy of the investment choice was to the long-term goals of the institution.