Good afternoon and welcome to ICG shareholder seminar on sustainability and people. For those who wish to ask a question, there are two ways to do so. You can type your question under Ask a Question tab, and this is open for submission through the presentation. Or for those who wish to ask a question live during the Q&A at the end of the presentation, dialing details can be found in the top right of the online portal. At this point, I will hand over to the ICG CEO and CIO, Benoît Durteste. Benoît, please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this seminar on sustainability and people. During the next 60 or so minutes, you will learn more about our business, why it should not come as a surprise given our DNA and our model, that sustainability and people have been key focus areas for a long time and a big part of our success, and why, as a result, it is essential for us to keep getting sustainability and people right to underpin our growth prospects. I am delighted to be joined today by a number of our colleagues, Antje Hensel-Roth, our Chief People and External Affairs Officer and a member of our executive committee, Krysto Nikolic, our Global Head of Real Estate, who incidentally is just 10 days into his tenure at ICG, so a formal welcome.
Chris Nicholls, who heads our Sale and Leaseback strategy, and Eimear Palmer, our Head of Responsible Investing. We have a busy agenda, and we will make sure there is time at the end to answer any questions you may have. The topics we are covering today are broad, and I want to leave you with five key messages. Firstly, this is not new to ICG, as you know. These areas have been a focus for us for a long time, and we aspire to lead our industry in these fields. Secondly, this is not a nice-to-have. Getting this right is integral to our success and our growth strategy. Thirdly, we are a people business. The critical importance of people is self-evident. The challenge is how do you foster the right culture?
How do you build and grow your ability to hire and develop diverse talent while preserving our focus on innovation and performance? This is an area we spend considerable time on. For sustainability, we have made an ambitious net zero commitment backed by Science-Based Targets, one of only a handful of alternative asset managers globally to have done so. This puts us squarely at the forefront in our industry, and more broadly, we feel we have a role to play to help steer our industry in the right direction. Fifth and final point, strategically. Responsible investing helps us future-proof our existing strategies and opens up new attractive investment and new funds opportunities while better serving the evolving needs of our clients. The importance of sustainability and people is reflected in the leadership structure.
The board as a whole, of course, takes a close interest in these matters, and specifically, we have non-executive directors with responsibilities for each of our employees and ESG. Antje, being a member of the executive committee, also underlines the critical importance of our people to our business. At the operational level, responsible investing is the day-to-day responsibility of our investment office, which reports to me. We have had a responsible investment committee since 2014, which is chaired by Rosine Vitman, and which works across all our asset classes. This leadership structure ensures that these topics are fully integrated into our everyday operations. The graphs on this slide demonstrate the importance of getting this right.
Over the last almost decade, we have increased our number of employees by 3.6x , our third-party AUM by 5.6x , and our fund management profits by over 6x . We've also grown our number of strategies over the period from five to 19. We are hiring people and are raising more capital across more strategies, which is driving growth in our profitability. Managing this growth is essential. Having the right people, the right culture, the right internal management structures all supports our ability to continue our track record of successful investment activity and operational excellence. Of course, we need to ensure that our product offering continues to meet our clients' increasing focus on responsible investing. Our performance in the financial year to date illustrates how our focus on sustainability helps future-proof current strategies and creates new opportunities for us.
As you have heard me say before, there are really two ways to organically grow our business. Grow up, that is increase the size of existing strategies, and grow out by developing new strategies. In our European corporate strategy, which is over 30 years old, we have materially enhanced our ESG engagement framework for the vintage we are currently raising, European Fund VIII. This fund will be covered by our SBT, our Science-Based Targets commitment. Even a strategy this mature can and indeed needs to continue to evolve, innovate, and particularly in its sustainability credentials. A focus on sustainability also presents opportunities for new strategies, opening new pools of client capital for us.
Sale and Leaseback and Infrastructure Equity are good examples here. They are both sustainability-themed funds helping to create a differentiated product that we can take to market, and both of which had very successful first time fund raises. There are, of course, other examples and more in our pipeline. It is an exciting time to be thinking about all the possibilities and delivering on the opportunities. 2021 saw some notable highlights in the areas of sustainability and people. In terms of our offering to clients, 99% of our AUM raised since March 31, 2021 has been into funds classified as Article 8, including into three sustainability themed products, underlining how we can help clients achieve their ESG related ambitions.
At a group level, from a people perspective, we joined the Women in Finance Charter back in 2018 with an ambition to have 30% of senior roles held by women by 2023. I'm delighted to announce that we have already beaten this goal with 35% of our senior leaders now being women. We also recognize that this is a constant effort throughout the organization. During the year, we have enhanced the focus on these topics for leadership at all levels of ICG. Finally, two highlights that span both our group and investment activities. We committed to net zero by 2040 across our operations and relevant investments. One, as I said before, one of only a handful of alternative asset managers worldwide to do so. This commitment is supported by approved and validated Science-Based Targets covering 100% of our relevant investments.
Eimear is going to discuss our pathway to net zero in a moment. In addition, we have raised $4 billion of ESG-linked financing in the last 12 months across the group and at fund levels, including a EUR 500 million sustainability linked bond we successfully priced just this past week. As you could see, and as you will hear during this session, we have put considerable effort into both sustainability and people in their many facets, and I am determined to continue to do so. It is a source of value creation, a competitive advantage, and strategically the right approach. At this point, I'll pass over to Eimear to talk a bit more about responsible investing at ICG, including our approach to net zero. Eimear.
Thank you, Benoît. Responsible investing is a core pillar of ICG's approach to investing, as evidenced by the fact that our responsible investing policy covers 100% of our AUM. Given the range of our products and asset classes, it is therefore an awful lot of work that goes on to ensure the policy is appropriately applied across our business. We've been investing responsibly for a long time, and we are continuously developing and enhancing our approach. Today, I sit on the investment committee for European Fund VIII and our responsible investing committee, which is chaired by Rosine Vitman, and this includes senior investment professionals from each of our major strategies. I say that to help underline both the breadth of our approach to responsible investing and also the seriousness at which our most experienced professionals take this issue.
That senior focus, of course, then permeates the rest of the organization. As Benoît mentioned, since March 2021, 99% of capital we have raised has been classified as Article 8 under SFDR, which is the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, i.e., funds that promote environmental or social characteristics. That includes capital raised across all four of our asset classes of structured and private equity, private debt, real assets, and credit. Finally, as part of the net zero commitment that Benoît mentioned earlier, we have committed that 100% of our relevant investments will commit to Science-Based Targets by the end of 2030. A meaningful commitment which requires an active work starting now across our portfolio. I want to spend a moment now on net zero. This slide gives more detail on our roadmap to achieving this by 2040.
Importantly, you can see that roughly 99% of our total in-scope emissions we are required to eliminate by 2040 are coming from our financed emissions, and that's really what we need to focus on to achieve net zero, i.e., our investing activities. Less than 1% comes from ICG's operating activities, and this underlines the importance of our responsible investing activities in achieving net zero. We are proud of this commitment. We are only one of a handful of alternative asset managers who have given such an undertaking, and it is ambitious. We're requiring a lot of work from now to make this happen. Why do it? Well, along with being the right thing to do, we also see this as a strong commercial rationale. It will help future-proof our portfolio companies, which in turn will help drive successful exits and therefore returns for our investments.
As our clients are increasingly focused on being aligned to net zero, we can also help them be part of the solution. There may be new investment strategies that we develop as a result of this commitment that helps broaden our product offering. This is a long-term commitment and one that will drive a lot of our efforts within responsible investing for the next decade and beyond. Science-Based Targets are an important part of our net zero commitment, and we have committed that by 2030, 100% of relevant investments will have an approved Science-Based Target with an interim target of 50% by 2026. This is a lot of real work starting in the diligence process when we first start to look at potential investments.
Once we've partnered with a company, it can take up to two years to get an approved and validated Science-Based Target in place. Because we focus on the mid-market, for many of our portfolio company, this is often the first time they are considered and understand, or they really have to consider and understand the carbon emissions of their business. We engage with the Board and with management teams, helping them to calculate their carbon emissions and then develop emission reduction targets aligned with the latest climate science, and also strategies and action plans to help deliver on these targets. Initially, a lot of this discussion is on the broader benefits of Science-Based Targets, some of which we outline on the right-hand side of this slide. A clear focus on reducing environmental impact helps future-proof businesses.
It helps them get ahead of regulatory changes, and with the growing focus from stakeholders and society more generally, it helps both protect and further their brand in the market. It also enhances their reputation as an employer and reinforces their social license to operate. This, we believe, can enhance valuation when we come to exit the business, as the eventual owners will be under pressure to demonstrate environmental credentials of their portfolios. Businesses that already have approved Science-Based Targets may be able to command a premium. The ancillary social, reputational, and employee benefits I've just mentioned will make our businesses fundamentally more attractive. We are seeing increasing focus from clients on our Responsible Investing activities. We are being asked more and more questions during the due diligence process in the run-up to making commitments to our funds.
Our clients are increasingly looking for ways to differentiate asset managers through ESG-related topics. Even in funds that are not explicitly ESG linked, the minimum threshold is getting higher. We are both being driven by and driving our clients' approaches here. We are developing new strategies and framework, enhancing our reporting to clients and also growing our responsible investing team. Getting this right helps us deepen our client relationships. We are engaging more with them, helping them think through these sometimes quite complex issues, reporting to them on broader range of topics, such as how we develop new products and strategies, and it also opens the door for us to manage more of our clients' capital and attract new clients into our platform. How do we do this? Our approach to responsible investing broadly operates in four areas, engage, innovate, report, and collaborate.
At the heart of what we do is engagement. This is with our colleagues, with the management teams of our portfolio companies and with our co-investors to help drive the responsible investing agenda within our portfolio. This requires a lot of work and proactivity, but it is fundamentally how we implement change. We innovate through the development of new strategies or new approaches to responsible investing, which helps increase our impact and also helps refine and broaden the product offering we can offer to clients. Reporting to our clients and other stakeholders helps you understand on a consistent basis what we do. It helps define the focus we have in this area and the progress we continue to make. We all know the phrase what gets measured gets done.
Finally, we are committed to driving change within our broader industry and collaborating with a wide range of organizations, some of which you can see here. More recently, we've been working very closely with the Science Based Targets initiative, helping to develop specific guidance to enable private equity firms to set Science-Based Targets for the very first time. By looking at responsible investing in this way, we feel we have a holistic and mature approach to the topic, enabling us to generate long-term positive impact for a range of stakeholders. I'm now going to pick up on a couple of case studies to bring this approach to life, starting with European Fund VIII. As Benoît mentioned, this flagship strategy is over 30 years old, and we are continually looking at how we can improve it.
European Fund VIII, launched in April last year with an enhanced engagement around ESG. At a fund level, we focus on three core areas, climate change, human capital management, and diversity and inclusion. These areas are each aligned with specific UN SDGs, as you can see here. We then work with portfolio companies in this fund to identify opportunities and challenges within these areas. Key metrics for each of these topics are then aggregated at a fund level. For example, the first investment in European Fund VIII, Alvinesa, is a producer of grape-derived natural ingredients. We have agreed core and company specific KPIs with management, which include reducing energy and water intensity and increasing the use of sustainable packaging. We've been working with management on setting Science-Based Targets.
They've just completed a baseline carbon footprint assessment with an external advisor and developed a detailed carbon management plan, which includes the installation of additional on-site solar energy and a fleet decarbonization plan, both of which will help significantly reduce emissions and drive value creation. We also have an ESG linked fund level facility for European Fund VIII, part of the $8 billion of ESG-linked financing we raised last year. This provides external oversight and is linked to how many portfolio companies have set Science-Based Targets and how many are implementing the fund's ESG engagement strategy. As with Science-Based Targets, a couple of slides back, we believe getting this right is valuable to a range of stakeholders, including being value accretive to our portfolio, and therefore to our clients. Moving on to innovation and looking specifically at Sale and Leaseback and Infrastructure Equity now.
These strategies are both sustainably themed and are aligned with the specific UN SDGs, Sustainable Development Goals, as we show on this slide. This alignment helps open specific areas of investment for the funds and gives a differentiated product we can offer to our clients. They both raised over $1 billion each from our clients in their first vintages. Really strong first-time raises, and underlining that launching the correct new strategies is powerful for our future prospects. In this way, innovating within responsible investing can enable new and existing clients to allocate capital to ICG. As you can see on slide 16, where we show the client split for each of Sale and Leaseback and Infrastructure Equity too. For Sale and Leaseback, 24% of the clients by number were entirely new to ICG.
For Infrastructure Equity, this split was the exact opposite, with 76% of clients by number being entirely new to ICG. Just between these two strategies, that's nearly 30 new clients we have attracted to ICG. Clients who we hope will grow with these strategies in coming vintages, and who we also hope will invest over time in other ICG products. Clients are generally very sticky, so in the long term, these new client acquisitions are potentially very valuable. By getting this innovation right where client demand meets ICG expertise and thinking creatively about integrating sustainability meaningfully into new products, we are able to help drive a more sustainable society and create value for a wide range of stakeholders, our portfolio companies, our clients, and our shareholders. As I look ahead, this is an incredibly exciting time to be in my role.
First and foremost, we need to execute on our ambitious net zero commitment, working with our investment teams and portfolio companies to deliver this goal. We will continue to explore new strategies and develop existing strategies, including looking at potential Article 9 for impact funds in due course, where we think our expertise and client demand overlaps. We have been focusing on ESG and sustainable investing for many years. We have made substantial progress already, and in the years to come, there is a lot of opportunity for us to continue to lead in our industry and help contribute to ICG's continued future success. At this point, I'll pass you over to Krysto and Chris to talk about real assets and in particular our Sale and Leaseback strategy. Thank you.
It's great to be here on my 10th day at ICG. Before moving on to real estate, I'd like to take a moment to pick up on something that Benoît touched on in his introduction, specifically the importance of people and culture. The caliber of the people at ICG was at the center of my decision to join the firm, and I've been incredibly impressed by the entrepreneurial ambition and attention to culture displayed by everyone I've met so far. There really is a huge opportunity at ICG, and I'm excited by it. Today, ICG Real Estate owns or finances an international real estate portfolio comprising assets across multiple jurisdictions, and we've been at the forefront of developing sustainability-linked investing and management strategies. Our focus on sustainability is a strategic and commercial imperative as we continue to build our business for a number of reasons.
First, actively managing our assets in a sustainable way drives up income at the asset level, reduces costs, and increases the pool of potential occupiers for our properties. We pay a significant amount of attention to the day-to-day minutiae of how we run our properties, everything from tracking and improving energy efficiency, to waste management, to transport infrastructure. Successful real estate fund management involves a number of counterparties, our clients who invest in our funds, our occupiers who live, work, or shop in our buildings, and counterparties who ultimately buy the assets from us at the end of our business plan. We are a patient capital with a multi-year investment horizon, and one thing we are sure of is that all of these counterparties will continue to have a focus on sustainability that is set to intensify over the medium term.
An early focus on this is a way to future-proof our investing and help generate value for our clients in the years to come. Finally, and linked to that point, as real estate investors anticipating multi-year trends, we think that the structural undersupply of sustainable real estate will persist. Large swathes of the real estate market face significant obsolescence risk, and our real estate business will be at the heart of the product, either through refurbishment or new development. Sale and Leaseback exemplifies a number of these important trends. I look forward to speaking with you all again in due course, and at this point I'll pass to Chris to talk more about that strategy.
First, let me give you a very quick recap on the Sale and Leaseback strategy. We acquire mission-critical real estate across continental Europe, leasing the assets back to the tenant on long leases. In many cases, 20 years. We own the real estate and have a long-term, often inflation-linked income stream from our tenants who rely on that building. From ICG's perspective, this is a long-duration real estate equity strategy with the potential to generate long-term management fees for our shareholders. Our first fund closed in September, hitting its hard cap of EUR 1.2 billion. Looking ahead, we see a potentially very significant market opportunity leading to a meaningful multi-fund strategy for ICG. Originally a collaboration between our real estate and SDP strategies, we are now a team of 10, and being part of the broader ICG ecosystem remains an important component of our success.
This is evident in two main ways. First, the strategy blends our investment expertise with an element of real estate and corporate credit understanding, both areas where ICG has a strong DNA. Second, we benefit from the knowledge of colleagues who may have a detailed understanding of a target market. This is very helpful in our assessment of a potential investment. For example, we spoke to ICG's life sciences team when we were working on the acquisition of Thermo Fisher Scientific's research and development facility in Finland. That is a 20-year lease, so having confidence in that sector was crucial to the successful execution of that investment. We believe this ability to access a multi-skill set makes ICG's Sale and Leaseback team a unique operator among our competition.
One final point on the strategy, which is very important, is that we are allocating up to 2% of the capital of our fund specifically to enhance the sustainability of the underlying portfolio. Crucially, we believe we can do this in a way that is accretive to the value of our portfolio. Eimear talked earlier about innovation within responsible investing. This is a great example of how we can create value for our clients and enhance our own by thoughtfully integrating sustainability into product offering. This is meaningful and impactful, and a differentiated product that we can take to market for our clients. Continuing on the theme of sustainability, the strategy has a number of characteristics that enable a particularly impactful approach. Because we deal with mission-critical real estate and long-term tenants, the landlord-tenant relationship dynamic is more of a partnership.
This enables us to take a holistic view on sustainability, and our interests are very much aligned with tenants who are often keen to improve the footprint of the real estate. The strategy is generally sector-agnostic, providing for a very large addressable market and which enables us to actively construct a diverse portfolio over the medium to long term. In terms of what that means in practice, we have a diversified mix of tenants, some of which are represented by the logos on the right-hand side. We are still in the early life of this strategy, but these five give an indication of the diversified portfolio we are building. As well as life sciences, we have electricity generation, social housing, a global parts distribution center, food retail, and a number of others. One consequence of this range is that we're able to consider sustainability in a number of ways.
Initial screening may be obvious, for example, filtering out investments such as petrol stations or defense-related tenants. The advance process is more granular, identifying risks and opportunities that may not be so evident from the outset. We can have a positive influence in a wide range of ways. For example, solar paneling, ensuring construction is done in a sustainable way, providing capital to help serve the local community, and so on. For each investment, we monitor bespoke sustainability KPIs through the investment period. I want to now talk about the Jaguar Land Rover or JLR transaction in more detail to bring that to life a bit more. This investment is a new 2.9 million sq ft site for JLR, currently under construction and due to complete later this year. It is the largest ever single occupier logistics built to suit transaction in Europe and will be delivered on 20-year leases.
The property will house JLR's global parts division, a GBP 800 million EBIT profit center for JLR, and will supply over 90% of JLR's after-sales parts worldwide. The property is clearly absolutely mission critical to the tenant. We acquired the property in early 2021, and during our diligence, spent time with ICG's credit team and other colleagues to make sure we really understood JLR, its end markets, and its credit risk. Another example of how being part of ICG's ecosystem is accretive to our strategy. There is, of course, a lot more I could discuss on the pure investment thesis, but I want to specifically highlight some areas relevant to sustainability and noted on the right-hand side of this slide.
As you can see, we have been able to have a positive impact across a wide range of topics, including waste recycling, job creation, CO2 reduction, and the creation of new woodlands. Importantly, we have improved the BREEAM rating from very good to excellent. This not only underlines the positive impact we have made, it is also beneficial to the tenant, and because there is a general shortage of BREEAM excellent assets in the market, it is actually creating value in the portfolio, as we believe this will enhance the attractiveness of the asset to a potential purchaser.
This, of course, is only one example, but it's a good case study of why we think this strategy has huge potential and why sustainability is intimately linked to its appeal to our clients and our tenants, and ultimately therefore, to the potential growth of the strategy in the future. In the space of four years, ICG had an idea for a strategy internally, built something from scratch, hired people into the firm, had a great first time fundraise, and we are now preparing to launch our second vintage. That simple narrative is a real testament to the entrepreneurial culture within ICG and the quality of the people I'm proud to have in my team. At this point, I'll pass to Antje to talk more about the people within ICG.
Chris, thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. First, I'd like to give you a quick snapshot of our employee base, which has evolved steadily. As Benoît mentioned, in the last decade, we have increased our employee base by 3.6 x, and since April 2019, it has increased by over 50%. Today, 45% of our employees sit within investment teams, 45% also in corporate and business services, and 10% in marketing and client relations. Our investment professionals are based locally across the globe. The majority in Europe with a notable proportion also in the U.S. New York is now our second-biggest office by far. There is also a dedicated team in the major centers in Asia-Pacific. This local presence and deep-rooted market access, as you know, is critical to our ability to source, execute, and manage investments successfully, as well as to reach our clients.
We have an exceptional team across the firm, and they hold the key to our future success. Given the strong trajectory for our business and our people, it is critical that we focus incredibly hard on maintaining and developing our culture and on retaining what makes us special while we evolve. The cornerstones of our culture are ambition, entrepreneurialism, collaboration, and responsibility. They have driven ICG since it was founded 30 years ago, and they remain key to our identity. They are what makes us really different, and they underpin our historical and future success. As you heard from Chris just now, Sale and Leaseback is a great example of this. We manage our culture very carefully in a number of ways. For example, if I look at our investment DNA, our investment committees are a powerful way of driving the culture of our teams.
Which opportunities we pursue, which we won't, how we think about our angles in a competitive market, how we think about risk, how we engage with management teams, and so on. Being nimble and being accountable are critical in this context. Therefore, we don't have one overarching committee, but rather each strategy has its own committee made up of the senior investment executives of that team, as well as a number of senior ICG professionals who ensure consistency of approach and culture. When we bring on senior people from outside of ICG, we spend a lot of time on due diligence, both technically and culturally. As with corporate acquisitions, culture is really one of the single most important determinants for success in recruiting. Therefore, senior hires have to be accretive to how we work and not just to what we do.
The same is true for how we develop our people at all levels once they are with the firm. There are formal and informal opportunities to engage with the whole of ICG, to hear the war stories and the learnings from their colleagues, and to constantly exchange ideas, cross-pollinate, and collaborate across different parts of the firm. All this reinforces our identity as we grow and diversify further. Finally, internal mobility helps transfer skills and values across the organization, and it allows people to experience the career benefits of a more diversified business. An example here is Infrastructure Equity. Penelope Dietsch from our European corporate team was involved in recruiting the infrastructure team. She had worked with them many years ago, and when the team joined, she transferred over.
This made a huge difference to their integration and their eventual success, and it also allowed her to grow in her own career. Rosine Vitman, who you've heard about before, also used to be an investment professional within the European team, and now she runs the global investment office overseeing ESG across the firm, value creation, performance management. Having been in the trenches for many years gives her exceptional credibility in linking those areas to investment outcomes. There are numerous examples of similar moves within and across business units, often between investment teams and our client relations function, and that lends credibility and client focus in both directions. Culture will continue to be a focus for me, for my colleagues on the executive committee, and the entire leadership team at ICG. It is critical for us and something about which we care passionately.
I mentioned hiring on the previous slide, and this is an area with a very successful track record of attracting exceptional talent across geographies and business units. We are always scanning the market formally and informally, and we have built from scratch or moved many successful sought-after teams and individuals over the past years. Strategic Equity, Infrastructure Equity, Life Sciences, and in Real Estate, Sale and Leaseback, and then the Real Estate opportunistic team, culminating in the hire of Krysto, whom you've just met. In marketing, we've recruited one of the top European leaders from BlackRock. In the corporate functions, leaders have joined us from first rate banks, investment advisory, and law firms to drive forward the infrastructure of our business and support our success. We look at talent acquisition holistically and strategically, and we anticipate the firm's needs well in advance.
This means engaging proactively and consistently with individuals and teams which are or could become interesting. We are then opportunistic and open-minded when great potential is available. It is hard to find, and when we do, we act quickly and decisively. Our success demonstrates that our offering is attractive, great career opportunities to make a real personal impact rather than being just a part of a machine, an engaged, diverse group of colleagues who will work as hard for you as you will for them, and close economic alignment to a team's and the overall firm's success. A culture and a proposition that successfully attracts and integrates new talent is very powerful in enabling us to grow and to continue to build on our success. With an employee base so ambitious and successful, comes the need to manage their career opportunities carefully.
We do give them every opportunity to realize their full potential. Again, having a platform that allows for growth and innovation is invaluable for these people because they just don't cap out in the opportunities in the same way they may elsewhere. On top of that, we have a thorough approach to talent development. We focus on leadership, which tends to be quite scarce in our industry. Our performance management identifies individuals' areas of growth early and then builds on it. Our training is comprehensive at a group and an individual level, and we build real stretch into how we design individual roles so that people continuously grow. We take succession planning incredibly seriously at all levels, and we are very proactive when it comes to forward planning, developing both internal and external talent pools, and continuously increasing our bench strength.
I'd like to spend a bit of time now on D&I. You can see our gender and ethnicity diversity at the level of the board, the executive committee, and all our employees. There is some way to go, but relative to our industry, we have made very strong progress, and we have good representation at senior levels. This is important for many reasons, including to ensure our junior and mid-level employees have visible role models from a range of backgrounds. From a gender perspective, we are particularly proud of not just achieving, but exceeding our commitment to the Women in Finance Charter, and doing so two years early, as you heard from Benoît earlier. Our ethnicity representation, where we can measure it at the moment, outweighs the underlying population statistics.
We have highly visible representation of other markers of diversity, which are not currently being formally measured given the challenges around data, be it social backgrounds or sexual orientation, for example. For me and for our business, perhaps more interesting is why it matters. Beyond being ethically the right thing, we are seeing and experiencing clear benefits in terms of innovation, creativity, the robustness of our debates, all of which are fundamental to our culture. In an organization growing as quickly and across as many areas as we are, and in an industry as competitive as ours, we simply have to ensure that we are constantly challenging ourselves, look at situations from different perspectives, and develop the most appropriate solutions for all of our stakeholders.
That, to me, is the real value of diversity to ICG, and there is a clear link between getting this right and the success of our business. How do we do that? Importantly, diversity is only the first step. The key is an inclusive environment in which people feel that they belong, and they can bring their whole selves to the firm. As we think about inclusion, we therefore need to keep in mind the comments I made earlier about how ICG's culture has demonstrated an ability over many years to absorb new people, to encourage cross-pollination, debate, and difference of opinion in determining how we adapt to our growth. To me, this is all part of the same equation. To get this right, we have a number of responsibilities. Firstly, leaders need to set the tone and set an example from the top.
This is why ICG is an important part of how we measure our leaders, be they EDs or across the wider teams. Secondly, it needs to come from the bottom up, with inclusion being driven by everyone and it being everyone's business. Employee-led networks, for example, play a significant role here. Some focus on diversity angles such as LGBT, ethnic minorities, women, and others don't specifically do that, but they support inclusion more widely in terms of physical and mental well-being, in terms of next generation making their way through. These networks are a very important grassroots way of enhancing inclusivity and connectivity, and they bring to life the tone which we set from the top. We then have to practice what we preach when it comes to development, promotion, reward.
What we value in every role in the firm is based as much on technical aspects as it is on cultural ones. You can't just be a good investor. To be really great and to be regarded as such, you have to live our values. When we think about your compensation or your next steps in the firm, we focus very much on how you do things, not just what you do. Finally, external advocacy. We have a real responsibility here for making the overall industry more diverse and more inclusive, rather than just complain that it is really hard to recruit certain groups. We want to help lead our industry on the many challenges we all face in similar ways, and we want to share best practice and help the ecosystem as a whole develop, which in time will benefit everyone.
This is why we partner with the organizations you see here on the slide and which have an impact across our industry and beyond. Which brings me to my final slide, looking ahead. There is no doubt that we have exceptional people who are thriving at the firm. This gives us an excellent foundation to grow to GBP 100 billion and beyond. We will continue actively to maintain and enhance our culture as we have done successfully throughout a significant growth to date. Our hiring will remain targeted, ambitious and strategic, and we continue to focus on developing these very best people in a culture of inclusion, innovation and ambition. It is a source of great pride as well as a key driver of performance. With that, I hand over to Benoît.
Thank you, Antje. Thank you all for your time today. Across all our asset classes, I see significant opportunity for ICG for many years to come. As I said at the beginning, our focus on sustainability and people is not an adjunct to our day-to-day work. It is a key pillar of our successfully executing on that opportunity, and we treat it as such. Hopefully that came through in the various examples we have discussed today, and I look forward to continuing to talk about these topics with you in the months and years to come. Before opening up for questions, I'd flag that we intend to continue to do these short seminars on specific topics with the intention of giving you, over time, a deeper insight into different parts of our business.
We'll announce the topic and date of the next seminar in due course, and any suggestions are, of course, welcome. Something to look forward to. At this point, we'd collectively welcome any questions.
Thank you, Benoît. We will first take questions submitted online, and we will then open the floor to live questions. The first question, Antje, is on our marketing team, and as we are raising more strategies, how are we evolving how we're growing our marketing team and structuring that team?
It's a very good question. As you know, the marketing team has been extremely successful over many years now, and it is built on a combination of great individuals working in a great team, but particularly a structure that is very thoughtful, that is very systematic, that has a very strong strategy in terms of how do we raise first time fund, how we raise early vintage funds, how do we raise more mature strategies. Therefore we've been able to be incredibly efficient with our existing marketing team, which has grown steadily, but in a very disciplined way. I think as we look ahead, the next step is thinking about areas of specialism. At the moment, this is very much geographically focused, but the next step will be asset class strategies.
For example, real estate being very relevant in this context. As this asset class evolves for us, it will probably be important to have one or two specialist salespeople attached to this asset class to ensure that they can cover the distinct client base that real estate has and make the most of our opportunity set in that area. The same goes for one or two other channels as well as strategies.
Thank you. Benoît, in your role on the various investment committees, can you give any examples of transactions or deals that you didn't do for ESG reasons and the thinking behind them?
Well, there are many, and we certainly don't comment on deals that we have turned down, but that others may have done. But generally I think it's... As we think about ESG, I think it's important to remember that this is really not new for us. The question here is about the selection process really, and potentially exclusion lists. These have been in place for years at ICG. What we are talking about today, and certainly the efforts we've made in the past 12 months or so, the move towards net zero and Science-Based Targets, that has, you know, limited impact or no impact on how selective we are at the outset. This is something we've put in place for years.
There are many areas, you know. I mean, we haven't been doing anything that's oil and gas related for years, including in our capital markets products. So that is one area, you know. There are many other examples. They don't necessarily, by the way, all touch on environmental issues. Some of them can touch on more social aspects where we just feel either uncomfortable or through the extensive due diligence process that we do, some aspect comes up that we find is not suitable for our strategies. M aybe what I can say, because this is something that we started tracking for, I think two, three years now, is that, it, depending on the strategy, but it's 10%-15% of transactions that we turn down. It's typically early on in our investment committee process, that we turn down for, you know, broadly ESG reasons.
Thank you. Eimear, you gave some examples in your strategic and private equity and your real assets asset class. Can you talk a little bit about how we think of ESG within direct lending where we maybe have less influence?
Sure. Yes, we definitely have less influence inherently in the capital structure, but there are clearly lots that we can still do in terms of engaging with portfolio companies and also with the sponsor on the deal. With the portfolio companies, for many years, we have an annual ESG survey. That gives us a really good understanding of where the companies are in terms of ESG, how sophisticated they are. We can pick up on the results of that survey and actually engage directly with the team with management teams through that. Secondly, I mentioned engaging with the sponsor. That's really key for us in direct lending, and we know these sponsors really well. We understand their kind of ESG practices.
We engage with them a lot in terms of other initiatives in the industry as well. Frankly, you know, we really consider the sponsor quite closely in those deals to make sure they're aligned with us in terms of ESG.
Krysto, you mentioned the potential valuation benefits and the need of subsequent owners to demonstrate ESG credentials. Is that valuation upside something that you are seeing meaningfully today in terms of due diligence and portfolio valuations? Or is that something you expect to potentially benefit from in the future?
We're absolutely seeing it today. If you looked at our investing framework three or four years ago, sustainability was one of many variables we assessed on whether we progressed a transaction. Today, it's almost binary. Our assets have to meet certain standards, or we won't buy them. That's as much for the ethical considerations that many have mentioned today. To pick up specifically on the point, what we're seeing is a real divergence in the market such that liquidity for assets that meet today's standard on green are highly liquid and very sellable, and you get premium pricing for them. Assets that don't meet that standard, the buyer pool is very much reduced. We're seeing a real bifurcation in the market that's causing really wide divergences in terms of value.
I've just had someone fire a question saying, "Same question for Benoît," which I guess means Benoît-
On real estate or more broadly on every asset class.
Which I think means more broadly, are you seeing this impact valuations across other asset classes?
I think I assume it's less on real assets and probably more on corporate. I think it's not yet filtering through in a meaningful way in valuations. There are, you know, significant divergence by geography. It has a much greater importance in both asset selection, therefore asset appetite in the market and valuation in Europe than it does in the U.S. for now. You have geographic specificities. I do think that if you think about what's, you know, how the market is evolving in Europe and how most market participants are evolving in Europe, they're, you know, going in our direction. I mean, we may be leading the pack, and clearly, there are very, very few that have signed up to Science-Based Targets for now.
I think if, you know, I'm pretty sure that five years from now, a majority will have. As a result, all those transactions that will not have started working, so portfolio companies that will not have started working on establishing and validating Science-Based Targets will be at a disadvantage. That will certainly flow through valuations. More broadly, I think there is increasing recognition that one of the key driver for valuation and growth for the next decades will be the climate transition because there's so much money that will need to be invested, both in, you know, by governments and the private sector, that it'll have a, an enormous impact across industries. It's very clear that any investment company that is thinking more than two or three years ahead has to take that into account.
You might not be able to put a number on it yet, but it's filtering through the way people are thinking about which industry to go into and which companies to invest in.
Thank you. We've covered the topics that have been asked online. At this point, I'll pass over to the operator to moderate the live questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Star one if you wish to ask a question. There are no question at the moment.
Maybe I'll add. I'll ask my own questions if there are no questions. I'll add to the you know the previous theme about what does that do to valuations, and if not now, in the future. For me, it's very clear, and it's certainly not in the you know the NAVs of portfolios today. But it's very clear that if we think five years ahead, the ESG elements and how far you've progressed with your portfolio company will constitute a very significant part of valuation uplift. It's not there. We don't value it today, but I am certain that when we look back five years from now, those portfolios that will have outperformed will be the ones that were early adopters of ESG KPIs.
Not just monitoring, which is the first step, but actually taking action. Actually implementing improvement measures at portfolio company level, bringing portfolio company managements alongside, which is, you know, easier said than done, particularly when you're talking about mid-market companies because they, you know, they haven't started yet in most instances. But if you've helped them do this work, there is very significant value creation that will come in the next five years, maybe sooner than that.
I have a question, Chris, on the Sale and Leaseback strategy. You gave a lot of detail on sustainability highlights of JLR. As you look across the rest of your portfolio, could you maybe give some other examples of where you have made positive impact, particularly social, was the question.
Yes, certainly. We have a social housing asset within the portfolio. Relatively small scale in terms of capital value, but high in terms of impact. We have, for example, had pop-up vaccination centers where locally the vaccination uptake was very low. We have replaced a football pitch, so put in place a brand new AstroTurf football pitch. And created a brand new play park within that asset. That's 1,215 apartments for fairly dependent members of society. Low impact from a capital perspective, but high impact from the actual residents' perspective.
One more. Benoît, as you look forward in, say, five years, what portion of AUM do you think could be sustainability themed strategies in, say, five years? Or how could your sustainability themed strategies develop?
As you may remember, we've taken the approach of embedding ESG throughout the firm and throughout all of our strategies some years ago. We did not come out with, you know, green funds, for instance, when they started emerging, three, four, five years ago. We decided to embed the whole ESG process, selection, and work throughout every one of our funds to different degree, depending on how much influence we have on the underlying portfolio companies. We've pointed to Sale and Leaseback. We've also pointed to Infrastructure Equity. There are some areas that lend themselves to having a greater sustainability focus. I think that will remain.
I think what's of greater importance is that the whole of the portfolio, it's 100% of what we do, will have a strong ESG base, if you will. That's, you know, before three, four, five years, we're not at 100% just yet because there are some technical difficulties in some areas, but we will be quite soon.
Perfect. Thank you. Well, ladies and gentlemen, if there are no more questions, thank you very much for your time. That concludes today's seminar.