A dashboard for sustainability

As the manager of the pensions savings of over one million Norwegians, Storebrand is a market leader in pensions. The company considers that this position gives it certain responsibilities, including for managing the funds of pension savers in the most sustainable way possible. 

“More and more companies want to know more about the sustainability considerations we take into account when making investment decisions in our capacity as a pension provider”, comments Karin Greve-Isdahl, Executive Vice President for Communications, Sustainability and Business Policy at Storebrand. “We are also seeing many companies wanting to use insight into this sustainability information in their own annual and climate reports. This is why we are now making insight into this sustainability information available in our corporate portal”, she explains.

Committed to making insight into sustainability matters available

Storebrand has extensive data relating to investments and sustainability. In order to provide its customers with this data in a simple and efficient way, it asked Itera to develop a solution that would display visually how its customers’ pensions savings scored on various sustainability considerations. The aim of the project was to provide customers with better insight into how their pension savings were invested and to create greater awareness and involvement in relation to sustainable choices.

“This is something that our customers were asking for. We also carried out a series of insight-gathering exercises to identify what type of information was most important for them”, explains Karin Greve-Isdahl.

Tailored to each individual business

The dashboard is tailored to each individual corporate customer, and provides an overview of a number of relevant factors:

• Carbon footprint shows what proportion of the customer’s pension savings is exposed to carbon-intensive activities.
  
  
• What proportion of the pension savings is invested in what are termed solutions companies – companies that are helping to solve the major challenges facing the world, for example within renewable energy, urbanisation, the circular economy and infrastructure.
  
  
• What proportion of the savings is invested in fossil-fuel businesses, which are defined as companies that derive more than 5% of their revenue from fossil-fuel energy.
  
  
• Sustainability score – a score that Storebrand has developed itself, which is based on analysis of the risks and opportunities associated with sustainability. The sustainability score indicates the combined ranking of all the companies in which the corporate customer's pension savings are invested. 
  
  

In summary, the solution helps Storebrand’s customers to make sustainable choices. It is easy to keep track of changes to their pension investments over time, and to share the insights internally and externally, as they wish.

Close collaboration based on agile principles

Itera and Storebrand collaborated closely when developing the solution and applied agile development principles throughout the whole project. Storebrand had prepared the design and sketches in advance of the project, while Itera was responsible for the solution’s front-end and back-end development. Itera also designed a REST-API that retrieves Storebrand's fund and sustainability data for the solution, and it contributed to the work on further developing the portal’s data pump. Data collection for services of this type requires a lot of capacity. 

The collaboration worked very well, not least because of Storebrand’s technical expertise and wide-ranging involvement, with sustainability, capital management, marketing, digital and corporate pensions all involved in the project. 

Karin Greve-Isdahl thinks that the key to the success of the collaboration was the commitment to Storebrand’s sustainability profile, as well as the strong collaboration with Itera’s skilled specialist team and developers.

The sustainability dashboard is now available to businesses with defined contribution pensions at Storebrand. Karin Greve-Isdahl explains that some corporate customers have already started to use the figures in their own annual reports in connection with their pension savings.

With the launch of the sustainability dashboard, Storebrand is leading the way within the area of sustainable investment, and is providing its customers with easily accessible and transparent insight into how their employees’ pension savings are invested.

“The feedback we have had on the dashboard has been very positive. The customers we have spoken to think it is really useful to have insight into sustainability matters so easily accessible”, comments Karin Greve-Isdahl.