Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Sustainable Responsible Investing and its Benefits

Sustainable and Responsible Investing (SRI) focused asset managers are facing many challenges these days. Their main task is to screen socially responsible companies by doing extensive research. They are also entrusted with the task of identifying companies that have superior ESG practices in comparison to the other companies. When it comes to the roles and responsibilities, the SRI focused asset managers have to generate good returns while investing in firms that amalgamate aspects of social and environmental responsibility and corporate governance.  


For Sustainable and Responsible Investing research tasks, asset managers generally rely on consulting companies. These consultant companies adopt stringent processes for company analysis and help in identifying the right data sources for various ESG parameters. These companies perform extensive research across multiple information sources and generally follow the three-level quality process.  

Hiring a multilingual consultant company is always a good idea because such companies can hunt through local media when they are evaluating the most lucrative emerging markets. Most research companies will provide you with highly qualified professionals, but you will have to consider the turnaround time (TAT) as well. Most research companies will commit a few days for extensive research on the various companies.

Many people are not aware of the transition of responsible and sustainable investing, which actually was an offshoot of socially responsible investing. The former was an approach that generally included owning certain types of assets. There were some region-influenced socially responsible investing ideologies that refrained for buying sin stocks (those of pornography distributors, distilleries, casinos, tobacco producers etc.)  

Most financial experts will tell you that socially responsible investing is now a subsector of sustainable and responsible investing—which still excludes owning some categories of assets. Today, fund managers who are involved in SRI search for companies that are looking to minimize the carbon footprint. The synonyms used for sustainable and responsible investing are ethical investing, green investing and impact investing. 

There are innumerous investment opportunities for SRI investors. In fact, there are hundreds of SRI mutual and exchange traded funds that are offering the vivid investor fantastic investment opportunities in different areas of the market. It is important to have a deep understanding of SRI funds before investing in them. These funds generally invest in two types of stocks—growth stocks and value stocks. The main categories of SRI funds are large, small and mid-cap SRI funds. In addition to these, you will also find categories of domestic, foreign and global SRI funds.


SRI managers are an elite class of fund managers who believe in avoiding companies that don’t have potential to effect change. There are many investing companies that have SRI focused funds—in which you can invest. Before you get enthralled by the idea of investing in SRI funds, you will have to perform negative screening and perform an ESG indicators analysis. This involves in-depth screening of firms on different ESG parameters or criteria. You may have to also look at some growing trends in the European markets if you want to invest in the European firms.