Engaging communities and sustainable investing

We have an active, employee-run community engagement program. Supporting communities is a cornerstone of our culture and an extension of how our investment teams invest.

We believe in driving a culture of giving back to society, within and beyond the firm.

Kelvin Teo

PM for Emerging Markets and Asia Pacific Equities
APAC Leader for Community Engagement

Our community activities are an extension of how we invest.

For close to 10 years now, we’ve talked to companies about their environment, social and governance (ESG) policies.

We find that good companies – those that are savvy at planning ahead, also tend to be more conscious of these factors. They understand that having the right ESG policies is part of a good sustainable business strategy.

At UBS Asset Management, ESG is more than just a buzzword. It’s in our investment process and also a corporate culture involving the business and investment teams.

Sustainable investing at UBS-AM

Mid-autumn festival: the joy of gifting

UBS Asset Management volunteering and giving back to the community

September 2022

This year, instead of gifting mooncakes for the mid-autumn festival, we channeled our resources to MINDS' Woodlands Employment Development Centre – a facility which serves persons with intellectual disability.

We spent a morning with their clients painting lanterns, playing an exciting mooncake-themed memory matching game, and filled our bellies with an assortment of delicious mooncakes and snacks.

Beyond the joyful morning, we also hope to empower their development in vocational life skills through our donation of four sewing machines. With these sewing machines, MINDs clients can continue to create products like aprons and tote bags for sale. Profits made from sales go towards a monthly allowance for the clients.

We also donated a printer to MINDS Craft to support their production of greeting cards, token of appreciation plaques, kraft tags and other items for MINDS eShop merchandise.

Social engagement is important to us and is part our corporate culture. It also guides the way we invest.

Chopping, cleaning and transporting rice at Willing Hearts

August 2022

Expect the unexpected, say our volunteers who have helped out at Willing Hearts.

We organized three sessions in 2022 to this soup kitchen to help them with food preparation, cleaning and door-to-door meal deliveries.

On one occasion, one of our volunteers went across the island to deliver boxes of rice that were donated by another organization. It was a back breaking experience but shows us the scale of resources required to run a soup kitchen.

Willing Hearts feeds 11,000 people in over 70 locations around Singapore and we are grateful for the opportunity to be part of this effort.

3-day football camp with Beyond Social Services

July 2022

Together with Beyond Social Services, we organized a 3-day football camp for the kids in the Lengkok Bahru neighbourhood during the school holidays in June 2022.

More than 30 children signed up for this and we had a great time teaching them to dribble, pass and shoot. On the last day, we gave medals to everyone for their enthusiasm and sportsmanship and ended off the evening with burgers and fries all round.

Contributing to the community can take many forms; all it takes is some creativity, and willingness to put time aside.

At UBS Asset Management, giving back to the community is part of who we are and shapes the way we invest.

Giving back to the community with UBS AM x Hunger Hurts!

February 2022

Over the Lunar New Year, we at UBS Asset Management wanted to do more than visit our relatives and chomp down on tasty Chinese New Year treats. We wanted to tackle the food insecurity issues in our communities.

Late last year, we set up UBS-AM x Hunger Hurts and raised S$6,000 in three weeks for this initiative.

Over a Friday afternoon, 20 of us headed down to two neighbourhoods. We gave out 360 packs of cooked food to families in Lengkok Bahru, while 75 families living at King George Avenue received grocery essentials from us.

Social engagement and giving back to the community are important to UBS Asset Management and forms a core tenant of our corporate culture. Here, they aren’t just buzzwords – it’s who we are.

Mid-autumn festival: disrupting tradition for good

UBS-AM social engagement Halogen Apr2021

September 2021

This year’s Mid-Autumn festival was a special one here at UBS Asset Management. Instead of our usual business tradition of gifting mooncakes, we chose instead to support the less privileged amongst us, both young and old.

For the second year running, we worked with Beyond Social Services to support youths from lower-income families. This time, we contributed to The Typing Warriors Program, an initiative to help children and youths gain some digital skills.

We also collaborated with Care Corner Senior Services to support our elderly community. We donated blood pressure monitors, anti-slip mats and a body BMI scale to a Care Corner centre in Toa Payoh, Singapore.

Many of us from the wider UBS Group also celebrated mid-autumn festival with the Care Corner Seniors virtually.

UBS Asset Management “walks the talk” on social engagement

Social engagement is important to us and is part our corporate culture. It also guides the way we invest.

For close to 10 years now, we’ve talked to companies about their environment, social and governance (ESG) policies and consider ESG factors in how we evaluate companies.

Coaching session for secondary school students with Halogen Foundation

April 2021

It was an early morning video call for 15 of us at UBS Asset Management Singapore, and business dealings were not on anyone’s mind.

We were excited to be volunteering for a video coaching session with Halogen Foundation Singapore (Halogen), to help secondary school students with their business plans.

This initiative is part of Halogen’s Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) program. It helps empower youths from underprivileged communities by cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset and build business skills.

During the two-hour 1-1 coaching session, we gave students pointers to fine-tune their business concepts and discussed how to size up their target audience.

Social engagement is important to UBS-AM and is part our corporate culture. It also guides the way we invest.

For close to 10 years now, we’ve talked to companies about their environment, social and governance (ESG) policies and consider ESG factors in how we evaluate companies.

About Halogen NFTE Program

The NFTE Program offer students the access to skills relevant to the real world, motivating them to stay in school and understand the importance of education. Through this, they will learn to recognize opportunities for success and be equipped with presentation and problem-solving skills. This can help them in their education and contribute to the economy by either running their own businesses or joining the workforce.

Charity polls and Back to School packs for beneficiaries of Beyond Social Services

August - December 2020

We asked our readers and investors to take part in two Charity polls to raise funds for Beyond Social Services, a charity that helps young people from less privileged backgrounds break away from poverty through education and development programmes.

But more than a straight out cash donation, we backed up Beyond Social Services when they told us that they needed sponsors for a Back to School project.

So we sponsored 400 “Back to School” packs for low-income kids in Singapore’s Henderson neighbourhood with SGD 30 bookshop and SGD 20 shoe vouchers to help them start the new school year.

UBS Asset Management “walks the talk” on social engagement

Social engagement is important to us and is part our corporate culture. It also guides the way we invest.

For close to 10 years now, we’ve talked to companies about their environment, social and governance (ESG) policies and consider ESG factors in how we evaluate companies.

Soup kitchen at Willing Hearts

12 July 2019

Several of us tuned out of balance sheets and conference calls one Friday morning and headed down to a soup kitchen run by Willing Hearts at the Kembangan Chai Chee Community Hub.

Most of us were assigned to the preparation area where we joined volunteers from all walks of life to clear stacks of vegetable waste, chopped up crates of leafy greens and onions.

The soup kitchen at Willing Hearts is wholly run by volunteers. The kitchen prepares about 5,000 meals daily and distributes to over 40 locations across Singapore, 365 days a year. Its beneficiaries include the elderly, the disabled, low income families, children from single parent families, or poverty stricken families and migrant workers.

UBS Asset Management will be organising another trip down to Willing Hearts again in September.

Teams from investment, legal, compliance, products, marketing, operations chopping up greens

Cleanup at East Coast beach

25 May 2019

Saturday mornings are prime for lazing in and brunches with family and friends.

Nonetheless, a group of us with kids and the significant others in tow, met at the East Coast Beach area D in Singapore to pick up debris and litter on our shore lines on Saturday morning.

From 8am to 10 am, we picked, sorted and bagged through the litter we gathered.

And the tally:

50kg rubbish
20kg recyclables
70kg total litter gathered

We ended the session by organising the recyclables into the various bins and disposing the rubbish collected.

Halogen Foundation

Mid 2016 - 2018

UBS Asset Management was a corporate partner to the Halogen Foundation for over 2.5 years.

Halogen Foundation is a values-based not-for-profit institution of a Public Character charity. It believes every young person has innate potential to influence and lead, becoming positive change agents.

We sponsored their Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) programme and through that adopted a secondary school in the Clementi neighbourhood. Each NFTE programme comprises a 60-hour session aimed at cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset and building business skills in youth from less privileged communities.

In the 2.5 years, we worked with three different secondary 3 classes of about 120 students in all where we taught them skills needed to cultivate entrepreneurship:

presentation techniques
making a business case
product marketing
profit and loss analysis

To give the students a taste of life in offices, we invited one group over to our premise at One Raffles Quay. We introduced them to various business functions during the office tour and brought them to see our investment team trading real time.

At the end of each programme, the students have to present their business cases to our senior management. The top 3 presenters went on to compete at the national level.

Explaining how trades are done to students

Supporting communities at UBS

UBS is also actively involved with supporting communities globally.

In line with our global policy, Community Affairs programs in Asia Pacific seek to overcome social challenges by investing in our two focus area of "education" and "entrepreneurship", providing targeted financial support and employee volunteering to generate positive impact in our local communities.

Supporting communities