Case study
Case study: How Storebrand quantifies real-world impact across its solutions portfolio
Measuring the real-world impact of sustainable investments is one of finance's harder problems: outcomes are hard to standardise, harder to attribute, and easy to overclaim. Storebrand, Norway's largest asset manager, turned to Upright to put science-based numbers on the impact of its solutions portfolio.
Arttu Narhi
Communications Lead, Upright
Published Apr 9, 2025·Updated May 20, 2026
In brief
- The problem: Measuring real-world impact of solutions investments faces standardisation gaps, attribution challenges, and rising scrutiny over impact-washing claims.
- The consequence: Without credible quantification, capital meant for sustainable outcomes can be misallocated and asset owners' trust in the industry erodes.
- The solution: Storebrand integrated Upright's net impact and UN SDG revenue alignment data into its evaluation and reporting of solutions investments.
Starting point: Growing need to measure the real-world impact of solutions investments
One of Storebrand’s targets is to invest 15% of AUM into solutions companies that significantly contribute to sustainable development. As the mainstream of capital markets is seeking sustainable outcomes in addition to financial return, assessing the effectiveness of these investments is crucial.
Robust impact quantification enables transparency towards set goals and asset owners’ intentions, and helps report the real-world value of investment decisions.
Accurate measurement is also critical to building trust in the industry – by dispelling concerns about ‘impact washing’, for example – and ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently. This will hopefully attract even more capital to help solve the significant challenges we face.
However, measuring sustainable and social outcomes comes with challenges, such as lack of standardisation, comparisons across sectors, and difficulty in attributing outcomes to specific investments.
Solution: Leveraging Upright’s net impact quantification and UN SDG assessment
Storebrand turned to Upright’s impact data engine for assessing their portfolio-level impact in a data-driven way, helping them overcome issues commonly associated with measuring sustainable and social outcomes, including attribution of impact to specific investments.
Storebrand found Upright’s net impact and UN SDG revenue alignment metrics to complement their other inputs and own analysis well. With Upright’s off-the-shelf impact assessments for over 42,000 other funds, Storebrand can also benchmark their different portfolios, showcasing that Storebrand Global Solutions' net impact score of +37% results in the top 4% of Upright’s fund universe.
“Given that Upright’s model provides a data-driven assessment of real-world net impact, it strongly supports Storebrand’s view that transparency and quantifying impact based on companies’ products and services is key to solving our most significant environmental and societal challenges,” Ripman explains.
Results: portfolio-wide impact data, benchmarked against the market
Accompanied by other inputs and Storebrand’s own analysis, Upright’s model enables a holistic net impact view across companies in their investment universe and all portfolios in aggregate. Deeper insights into, for example, their portfolios’ environmental costs and knowledge impacts (like the use of scarce human capital) enabled more informed decision-making for capital allocation.
“We believe that investing in companies making a positive net impact that are well-positioned to achieve the UN SDGs will help ensure a better future and deliver optimal risk-adjusted financial returns over time,” Ripman says.
“Given the complicated challenges of assessing impact and goal alignment, tools like Upright will be vital for asset managers to achieve these important objectives.”
Storebrand shared their perspective on the partnership and its benefits in their December 2024 article. Find further insights from their perspective here.
Article cover picture: Image by Upright, Philip’s portrait by Storebrand.
See where your portfolio sits on real-world impact, benchmarked against 42,000+ funds.
Arttu Narhi
Communications Lead, Upright
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