BIMB Invest declares 8% yield for BIMB-Arabesque i Global Dividend Fund 1

KUALA LUMPUR: BIMB Investment Management Bhd (BIMB Invest), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bank Islam Malaysia Bhd, has declared an 8% income distribution yield for its multi-currency global syariah-environmental, social and governance (ESG) equity fund, the BIMB-Arabesque i Global Dividend Fund 1.
The income distribution exceeded its benchmark target of 6% as well as higher than last year’s income distribution yield of 7.1% for the ringgit class and 6.9% for the US dollar class.
BIMB Invest CEO Najmuddin Mohd Lutfi said since the fund was launched in November 2015 until Feb 2018, the fund has delivered a total return of 30.63% and 19.14% for the US dollar and ringgit class respectively.
To date, the fund is the largest Islamic global equity fund in Malaysia with a total fund size of about RM330 million. The fund is also the first Islamic global equity fund in Malaysia that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in portfolio construction and the first Islamic global equity fund in Malaysia that integrates syariah principles and the ESG criteria.
The BIMB-Arabesque i Global Dividend Fund 1 uses artificial intelligence and big data technology in its investment process. The investment process removes human biases and intuition, to construct the best combination of stocks from a universe of 77,000 global listed companies to form a portfolio of up to 100 stocks daily by using more than 1,600 selection criteria that process more than 100 billion data points.
The fund rebalances its portfolio on a daily basis between equity and cash for sustainable risk adjusted investment returns. The systematic and rules-based quantitative investment approaches also take into account ESG data to invest in companies with sustainable financial future. It applies more than 200 ESG parameters through more than 50,000 sources across 15 languages globally in its ESG assessment processes.