Key Takeaways
- Trinity College, Cambridge, has long prioritized sustainability, and in 2021 solidified this in its investment policy by committing to having a significant, lasting and positive impact on the environment, including a net-zero goal by 2050
- Like many LPs, Trinity views sustainability as integral to its investment approach, due to its long-term investment horizon and exposure to systemic risks, as well as broader stakeholder interest in addressing environmental and social issues
- Within the endowment, this focus on sustainability is supported by a broader ESG policy and a three-pillar sustainability strategy that includes mitigation, positive investment, and engagement
- Trinity’s message to GPs is that sustainable, long-term financial returns with positive real-world impact will ultimately define their evaluation of GP performance going forward
Adams Street’s Director of ESG and Responsible Investing, Yohan Hill, recently met with Romane Thomas, Investment Manager at Trinity College, Cambridge, to discuss its approach to responsible investing and sustainability as an LP, as well as her thoughts about responsible investing in private markets more broadly.
Romane Thomas is an Investment Manager at Trinity College, Cambridge, where she oversees over half of the College’s £2.5 billion ($3.37 billion1) endowment. She leads the equities portfolio, spanning public equities, venture capital, and private equity.
Prior to joining Trinity, Romane worked at McKinsey & Company, advising clients on strategic and investment-related matters. She holds degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and is a CFA charterholder.
Romane also serves on the Investment Committee of the Robertson Trust and is a Governor at the Stephen Perse Foundation.
Transcript
Yohan Hill: Welcome everyone to another edition of ESG in Practice where we explore topics linked to the theme of responsible and sustainable investing.
Today I’m joined by Romane Thomas, Endowment Investment Manager at Trinity College, Cambridge. Romain, it’s a pleasure having you with us. Thank you for joining.
Romane Thomas: Great to be here.
Yohan Hill: To start us off, would you mind giving us a brief overview of your background and role as well as how that relates to Trinity’s sustainability strategy more broadly?
Romane Thomas: Absolutely. So I actually started my career at McKinsey before coming to Trinity College, Cambridge, where I’ve now been for five years. I’ve always been very passionate about education.
I was the first person in my family to go to college, and I was actually born in France and then emigrated to the US when I was quite young. And I tremendously enjoyed all my studies. I did a dual degree between Sciences Po Paris2 and Columbia for my undergrad and then my master’s at LSE, and I think this really opened my horizons and that’s why I find a lot of purpose in working for the college.
And Trinity is one of the colleges of the University of Cambridge. So we were actually founded in 1546 by Henry VIII and we are home to an absolutely amazing community of students, academics, and staff, and we have had incredible alumni throughout the years—Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Byron, and of course King Charles III, and we’ve been associated with many different Nobel Prize winners over time.
And back when we were founded, the college was very lucky to be endowed with lands across the UK, which, over time, have turned into an endowment, and that endowment is the financial engine behind the college and it powers the college’s mission towards education, learning, and research for the public benefit. And today the endowment generates between £45 and £55 million each year and that funds the college but also funds many other things beyond the college.
We’ve used our endowment to provide financial assistance to talented students irrespective of means, also attract the best academics to come to college, but also to Cambridge, and to fund their groundbreaking research and maintain the absolutely incredible buildings and the courts of the college, which I have the pleasure of having my office right in the middle of.
And we also support other colleges in the university and other charities, and this includes many programs across research and education, for example, the Trinity College Maintenance Grant or the Trinity Cambridge Research Studentships Scheme, and many of these programs are meant to really ensure that, no matter your background, you can enjoy the Cambridge experience to the fullest.
And my specific role at Trinity is investment manager. What that means is I’m in effect part of a very small team of three people who actively manage the endowments. And today the portfolio that we manage is split between property, and that property is held directly in the UK, and equities, and equities is really what I’m focused on and what I’m responsible for, and I specifically oversee our program to increase our allocation to venture capital over time, and I also oversee all of our sustainability commitments across the endowment.
In reality, every person who works for the endowment is responsible for overseeing the sustainability commitments of the endowment. I’m more the point of contact kind of bringing it all together, if you will.
And I also wear two other hats outside of my role at Trinity. The first is I’m a governor of the Stephen Perse Foundation, which is a family of schools in Cambridge, and I also sit on the investment committee of the Robertson Trust, which is the largest grant giving trust in Scotland.
Yohan Hill: Could you say a bit more about Trinity’s main goals as it relates to responsible investing and sustainability?
Romane Thomas: Absolutely. I should say that, for Trinity, sustainability is not a new topic. It’s always been top of mind for our community, and I think what is more recent for us is our solidification of sustainability as a key goal in our investment approach.
In 2021, we committed to elevating sustainability in our investment policy, and that meant that we committed to having a significant lasting and positive impact on the environment, and this included an aim to reach net zero by 2050, and we also have some intermediate targets to support us in getting there.
And this really hasn’t changed in the recent past. We continue to be very focused on having a positive real-world impact, and really, current events are not likely to affect that belief that, in effect, returns have to be sustainable if they are to be long term. And long-term investment for us is really sustainability investment.
Yohan Hill: A number of industry surveys, including our own global survey, suggest that many LPs continue to be focused on ESG and sustainable investing, despite the current headwinds. What are your own views on this, and why do you think it’s such a priority for many LPs?
Romane Thomas: Well, the first thing is I’m very sure to hear that.
Many LPs are still focused on this. I’m not very surprised. I think many LPs in venture and private equity and private assets, in general, are more long term, more institutional than investors in other asset classes, and as such, they have longer term time horizons, and I think they understand that their portfolios are exposed to systemic risks. And for me and for us at Trinity, we’re really as long term an investor as it gets. We’ve been around for nearly 500 years. Some of the properties that we still own today, like the Cambridge Science Park, were actually—the underlying land was given to us back in 1546. So we really are very long term, and we hope to be around for many more hundreds of years.
So because our aim is to fund the college’s purpose in perpetuity, and we have an ongoing objective to achieve inflation plus 5% in the long term, it’s really something we need to think about all the time. And that’s why it’s a priority for us.
We consider ourselves to be a universal owner. We are exposed to the global economy, and in particular, that’s quite clear through our public equity investments, where we have holdings in over 2,000 companies. So we can’t diversify away from ESG risks, and especially, especially for example, climate change in our case, and I think that’s why for us, sustainability is underpinning concepts and a top priority for how we invest in the endowment.
And we strongly believe that, in the long term, sustainability and commercial returns are complementary.
And I should also say, beyond investing on a different level, the college community cares a lot about ESG topics. Widening participation is a significant focus for us in college admissions, outreach, and climate change is an area where we have many students and many academics researching solutions.
We have a fellow looking into how to refreeze the Arctic. We have another academic studying the rate of melt in ice glaciers. So at the underlying level, our community is really involved, and this matters deeply to them, and of course, the students we have are young people, and they have to live and work in a world affected by those risks. So that’s also why it’s a priority for us.
Yohan Hill: What’s top of mind for you in terms of ESG or sustainability related topics right now? And what about these topics gives you cause for concern or optimism?
Romane Thomas: Yes. So our focus, in terms of how we invest the endowment, is really on the environment, because we feel that that is the area where we can make most difference.
However, we do have a broad ESG policy as well, and that involves everything from screening, but also engaging with underlying companies on topics like antimicrobial resistance, which is a rising threat today.
So we do have a kind of overlay of ESG on the endowment in general, and we actually have a sustainability strategy that looks at everything, so not just climate.
We have three pillars. The first is mitigation. The second is around positive investment, and the third is engagement. So we’re trying to mitigate our negative impact on these topics.
So in the case of climate, that would be by degasifying our buildings on the Cambridge Science Park, which we founded in the ‘70s. Positive investment, I think, is an area we think we can make a lot of difference. So in our property portfolio, we were thinking about tree planting, biodiversity enhancement, but also in our venture and private equity portfolio, we believe we can make an impact in terms of positive investment by committing to underlying funds that are having a positive impact and not just on climate, but other topics as well.
And then finally, on engagement, I think that’s key for us. We don’t control the vast majority of our underlying investments, really. So we have to work with our managers and our property tenants towards those goals.
In terms of topics that give me concern, at a high level, there’s been general ESG backpedaling around a variety of topics, and at a time where we really need to be seeing a recommitment to some of these topics, including DEI, but also climate, obviously.
There’s another topic which I think we need to mention, and that’s AI. There’s a lot of cause to be optimistic, I think, around AI. First, I think it can be a huge driver, and it is being a huge driver of productivity gain and can lead to many positive developments in health, but also in climate and other areas.
But I think it also comes with risks, and we’ve seen recently how some of these manifest, but obviously the costs around how AI is powered, also the challenges around data privacy and more. So there’s definitely a lot of cause for optimism, but also lots to concern us.
Yohan Hill: Looking forward, what’s on the horizon? How do you see things developing from here?
Romane Thomas: Yes, so I guess the question is, how long is a piece of string? How far on the horizon shall I go? If Trinity’s horizon is 100 years, we might need more than 10 minutes for this podcast.
No, but in all seriousness, when it comes to sustainability and ESG topics, I think they’re here to stay, and certainly for us, that’s not going to change.
The current environment is actually concerning, but it’s also making room in the landscape for those LPs and those GPs who truly understand responsible investment and believe that sustainable investing is important to long-term real returns.
So I think how do I see things developing from here? I think our voice as LPs is probably more important than ever now. We’re not speaking into a cacophony of voices anymore, so we have to keep steady, we have to spread that message far and wide.
And I think often asset owners and LPs, in general, believe that because their asset pool is not that large by global terms, and I can certainly say that, for Trinity, our endowment is not large by global terms, or in global terms, then what voice do we have? But actually, I think that our voice weighs a lot more than the size of our assets as LPs, and I think we need to use that and make sure we’re being deliberate and effective in how we use it. And then in terms of how we’re going to continue to do things at Trinity, really, our goal is to continue to fund the great brains that are working on some of the solutions to these topics, and we’re going to continue to learn and improve our approach as we go.
Yohan Hill: Finally, if there was one key message you wish to convey to GPs managing investments on your behalf, what would that be?
Romane Thomas: Do I have to be very concise here and give only one message? Or can I give a series of messages? Yeah, I think our message to our GPs is we will judge you by your sustainable long-term returns. Our focus is on funding the college in perpetuity. We want all of our GPs to have a real-world impact in terms of performance, but also in terms of sustainability, in terms of ESG.
And I always ask myself the question, whenever I do anything on sustainability in our endowment, does the environment care? Do people care about what I’m doing? Is it going to have a real-world impact? I think if the answer is no, you have to ask yourself, why are you doing that? And I think the broader message for us, and that we want to give to our GPs, is that long-term investment is simply sustainable investment.
Yohan Hill: Romane, it was a pleasure hearing your thoughts on this topic. Thanks again for joining us.
Romane Thomas: Thank you, Yohan. It was great.
1. At January 22, 2026
2. Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Paris Institute of Political Studies)
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