Sustainability
Tenured Harvard Business School professor, now at Oxford University.
I would be surprised to learn of anyone interested in sustainable investing who isn’t aware of DWS’s dramatic dismissal of Desiree Fixler. She was the group sustainability officer at the big German asset manager DWS and was fired after eight months on the job. Fixler has an extensive background in investing and investment banking and brought a broad range of experience to DWS, making her sudden dismissal after such a short tenure all the more surprising.
Desiree Fixler | DESIREE FIXLER
DWS, led by CEO Asoka Woehrmann, has a market cap of $7.4 billion. This compares to $15.2 billion for its French rival Amundi and $23.4 billion for its U.K. rival Legal & General Investment Management. Germany’s storied flagship bank Deutsche Bank (DB) owns 80% of DWS. DB has a market cap of $26.6 billion, ranking it 76th in the world. The top two banks are JPMorgan Chase at $471 billion and Bank of America at $341 billion. Nordea Bank in Finland has a market cap about twice that of DB at $52.6 billion. In terms of GDP, Germany is the fourth largest country in the world (after the United States, China, and Japan). Its GDP is 14 times that of Finland which is ranked 44th.
DWS leaked an internal memo to the press, thereby putting Ms. Fixler in the public glare. The dispute between DWS and Ms. Fixler is based on concerns she had regarding the legitimacy of the firm’s claims about how much of its assets under management deserved an “ESG” or green label. This event has only heightened the debate, with others such as Tariq Fancy and Ken Pucker weighing in to question how legitimate ESG investing really is today.
Fixler’s story is now all over the press from publications such as The Wall Street Journal on August 1, 2021 and August 25, 2021, the Financial Times, and SPIEGEL International. As a result of Fixler’s allegations, BaFin (the German financial regulator), is now doing an investigation of DWS’s marketing claims. In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Justice (through the attorney general in Brooklyn) have also launched investigations. We shall see what they conclude. In the meantime, this dispute between DWS and Ms. Fixler has certainly caught the attention of asset managers all over the world who are selling “green” products by whatever label.
Robert G. Eccles of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford is the author of a number of books on integrated reporting, sustainability and the role of business in society. His focus is on sustainability from both a company and investor perspective. Professor Eccles is also involved in a variety of initiatives to embed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues in real world decision making. One of these is the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), of which he was the founding chairman. In 2018, Professor Eccles was selected by Barron’s as one of the top 20 influencers on ESG investing.
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