SFDR Awareness

From investment firms to pension funds: many financial organisations fall within the broad scope of the SFDR. Given the large impact, knowledge of the SFDR and its key concepts and obligations is important for all professionals working at financial market participants.

For investors who want to contribute to a sustainable future, it is important to fully understand the purpose, obligations and concepts of the SFDR. In your selection process, you will come across investments with appealing claims for sustainability. The SFDR helps you make good choices in this area.

This e-learning is a course at HBO (higher vocational education) level. We assume that participants already have some prior knowledge of the financial sector.

This training is developed to complement our ESG Awareness training, which only briefly covers SFDR.

This e-learning teaches you the outlines and context of the SFDR. Upon completion, you will be able to:

• Outline the ESG developments within the European Union that form the basis for the SFDR;
• Describe the purpose, structure, scope and monitoring of compliance with the SFDR;
• Distinguish key concepts from the SFDR such as sustainable investment, sustainability factors and sustainability risks;
• Name the disclosure requirements deriving from the SFDR;
• Describe what Principal Adverse Impacts (PAIs) are and how financial organisations should deal with them;
• Describe classification and disclosure obligations at the product level;
• Outline other ESG-related regulations.

Baseline measurement

This awareness training starts with a baseline measurement to determine whether you can go straight to the test or better study the theory first.

Theory

• Context of the SFDR: including Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment, EU course of action regarding ESG, European Commission action plan, Regulation taxonomy/classification system sustainability and platform for sustainable finance.
• Introduction into the SFDR: purpose, legal framework, technical standards, level II, scope, compliance monitoring and key concepts.
• Disclosure requirements: entity-level disclosure requirements, integration of sustainability risks in investment policy, negative sustainability impacts, product-level disclosure requirements and Taxonomy Regulation and SFDR.
• Other rules and initiatives: including integration of ESG considerations in delegated regulation, Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD), Pensions Act, Shareholder Engagement Directive, the IMVB for pension funds and the IMVO Covenant.

Test

You can complete this course with a test in the learning environment. You can also take resits in the learning environment.

Certificate

After passing the test, you can download your personal SFDR Awareness certificate from the learning environment.

The SFDR Awareness training can be completed via our online learning environment, wherever and whenever it suits you. The training takes between one and two hours to finish, depending on your prior knowledge about the subject.

In our online learning environment, employers can view and export individual study progress via a freely accessible dashboard. This provides you with an overview of the student, course and content statistics for all courses taken within your organisation. Please ask for details during the enrolment process.