The bank has flagged the role of private capital in hitting goals such as ending poverty and raising education quality, while it also announced new offerings in the impact investing space.

UBS is to offer a suite of new thematic and pooled impact investments, it has announced as it also unveiled a White Paper on sustainable development goals at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

After raising a record $471 million for its Oncology Impact Fund in 2016, UBS said will steer at least $5 billion of client assets into new Sustainable Development Goals-related impact investments over the next five years to help make this area more mainstream.

The announcement and White Paper underscore how impact investing, where money is put to work to achieve a variety of objectives – not all of them financial – while achieving a return, has gained ground in recent years. Impact investing has a way to go in terms of size, but the amounts are already large. There are $60 billion of impact investing assets under management, and $12.2 billion of fresh investment was expected to be put in place last year, according to the Global Impact Investing Network, a forum for the sector.  One forecast has impact investing AuM topping $3 trillion over the next decade. 

Private capital is “critical” in eradicating global hunger, helping to promote education, health, affordable clean energy and reaching other goals, the world’s largest wealth manager said in the White Paper.

Such private wealth is likely to critical in meeting United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the Zurich-listed lender said in its report, which includes contributions from the WEF.

The bank said investments will include an Impact Multi-Vintage Program, which will diversify clients' impact portfolios over a number of fields and vintage years; access to a diversified impact portfolio via The Rise Fund, which is led by TPG Growth, a leading private equity manager; and at least one other major thematic impact investment per year. 

UBS said will also help launch Align17, a philanthropy and investment platform focused on SDG funding gaps. The Gates Foundation, the SDG Philanthropy Platform, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and TPG Growth and The Rise Fund have expressed interest in collaborating with Align17, the bank said.

To put the scope of private contribution in context, UBS’s report said that in 2015, global household wealth totaled $250 trillion (source: Deutsche Bank). $5-7 trillion a year is needed to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, it said, and argued that private wealth, which tends to face lower regulatory costs and constraints, is particularly important for driving SDGs.