Investment consultants
Investment consultants cover a wide spectrum of professionals from which we distinguish between:
- Financial advisors - who advise on cash and mutual fund investments to individual (retail) investors
- Wealth managers - who advise on and manage the discretionary portfolios of ‘high-net worth’ investors
- Institutional pension fund consultants – who help institutional asset owners to develop and implement policies and management practices
Over the last twenty years, a number of these consultants have built successful businesses as specialists in SRI investment. Equally importantly, ‘mainstream’ advisors have built SRI advisory capacity into their broad-based platforms. Both groups have proven themselves to be important conduits for demand. Indeed many have increased demand and crystallised latent demand through their advice to asset owners about SRI and its implications. (In particular, they have played an important role in replacing myths and misconceptions about SRI with robust analysis of its performance.)
Investment consultants typically adjust their core services in the following ways to cater for clients’ (asset owners’) sustainability preferences as follows:
- Policy/strategy support – (for institutional investors) by helping trustees develop ‘Statements of Investment Principles’ that incorporate sustainability and responsibility objectives alongside their financial objectives. Recently this has included developing policies and practices to ensure PRI-compliance
- Specialist evaluation of asset managers’ SRI capabilities
- For retail investors – leading to the selection of funds that best suit investors’ financial needs and environmental and social priorities
- For institutional investors – detailed evaluation and benchmarking of SRI asset managers’ capabilities, their deployment of various SRI strategies and (recently) their PRI compliance. (This is, of course, set alongside (or integrated with) an evaluation of the managers’ investment capabilities)
- Monitor asset manager performance and reporting – including investment performance, SRI engagement activity and integrated analysis reporting
- Proactive research – to illustrate the investment relevance of sustainability factors some consultants have conducted research projects on specific issues with a view to making asset allocation or manager recommendations on the back of this research
Two reports have recently been published that review the SRI capabilities of investment consultants:
To get connected with the global SRI & corporate governance community in a way that suits their ‘typical’ needs and priorities, an institutional investment consultant user of SRI-CONNECT should:
View the user cluster page for asset owners
Read through the activity on, by and related to asset owners and their SRI / CG engagement here: User cluster: Asset owners
Update personal profile
Update your personal profile here to record your (likely) interest in:
- SRI interests: Investment process – asset allocation | Investment process – beliefs objectives & policy | Investment process – Manager evaluation appointment & monitoring
- Sustainability issues: To reflect any particular interests that you have
- Sectors: To reflect any particular sectors that your investments are exposed to
Join discussion groups
Join these online discussion groups:
Make connections
- To some potential clients: Asset owner members of SRI-CONNECT
- To some of the leaders at asset manager firms: Who’s in charge of SRI & CG (AM filter)
- To some of the leaders at research providers: Who’s in charge of SRI & CG (Research provider filter)
Update your firm’s profile
Over the coming months, SRI-CONNECT plans to publish a guide to investment consultants that can advise on SRI & corporate governance research. (Who you gonna call?) To ensure that your firm is listed in this, make sure that you have detailed your capabilities by updating your organisational profile.
Investment consultants typically need to:
- Be experts on global developments in SRI & corporate governance
- Be seen to be experts on these developments … so that they attract new asset owner clients
Link to QuickStart tips for investment consultants
To do this, investment consultants typically use the following aspects of SRI-CONNECT:
Market Buzz
- Raise their profile by distributing to institutional asset owners any pro-active research that they publish on sustainable investment topics
- Receive news, research and reports from companies, SRI research providers and others – also notifications of discussions, events and blogs – all filtered to their own specific interests
- Search the SRI-CONNECT database for research and reports
Directory
- Find and filter profiles to identify asset managers’ and other suppliers’ capabilities
Marketplace
- Identify from the Marketplace consultancy projects that asset owners are tendering for.
Network
- Maintain a profile to present their SRI capabilities to institutional asset owners
- Host and participate in industry events and briefings
- Discuss industry developments with customers, peers and suppliers
- Build and manage their own SRI network via the groups, events and messaging functions
On SRI
For investment consultants, the 'On SRI' section contains:
- SRI Primer – which considers SRI from first principles and aims to address all of the questions that newcomers may have about the industry. For the more advanced, it also describes 21 distinct SRI strategies, outlines progress in 5 asset classes and addresses the question of ‘proof, prejudice & investment performance’
- Ecology of SRI – this report
SRI-kipedia
- Source - updated information on the SRI industry, its markets and deployed strategies
- Contribute - to this ‘work-in-progress’ knowledge-base on the SRI industry
Registration and membership
- Some of these services are freely available to all browsers
- Most are only available to ‘registered users’ (registration is free)
- Some are restricted to subscribed members (subscription is cheap!)
For full details, see Registration and subscription
