The Call No.8: Sustainable investing advice – for financial advisors

What: A new guide walks financial advisors through the process of building a sustainable investing practice, from starting the conversation with clients to helping them monitor and manage their impact investments. The message: sustainable and impact investing is key to client recruitment and retention. Agents of Impact Call No. 8 will help financial advisors (and their clients) address pervasive industry myths about sustainable investing; disentangle the complicated web of vocabulary used to describe the approach; and provide practical recommendations on how to help clients fulfill their sustainable investing goals. Who: ImpactAlpha’s David Bank and Dennis Price in conversation with TIIP’s William Burckart, co-author of Fundamentals of Sustainable Investing: A guide for financial advisors, Noel Pacarro Brown of the Conscious Wealth Management group at Morgan Stanley, Mark Sloss of Regenerative Investment Strategies and Brie Williams of State Street Global Advisors. Synopsis: “This is a retention and recruitment conversation,” Morgan Stanley’s Noel Pacarro Brown said on ImpactAlpha’s Agents of Impact Call No. 8 last week. “There is no one type of client to have this conversation with. Everyone is wanting this conversation.” Sustainable and impact investing is no longer just a trend among women and millennials, she said. Financial advisors need to engage all of their clients, particularly as wealth shifts between generations and toward algorithmic investment platforms. Nearly 200 ImpactAlpha subscribers signed up for The Call, which was specifically aimed at helping advisors eager to start those conversations. Co-author William Burckart introduced a new guide, “Fundamentals of Sustainable Investment,” that he said is meant to “get into the weeds,” starting with that first client conversation. Burckart, who heads The Investment Integration Project, developed the guide with the Money Management Institute to walk financial advisors through the process of building a sustainable investing practice.  

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    **The Call is an exclusive benefit for subscribers. Not a subscriber yet? Use code THECALL8 at subscribe.impactalpha.com to get two weeks of free access to ImpactAlpha.   Additional resources:

• “How to start the conversation, and other sustainable investing tips for financial advisors,” ImpactAlpha.
• “Fundamentals of Sustainable Investment: A guide for financial advisors,” Money Management Institute and The Investment Integration Project.
• “Sustainable Signals,” Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing.
• State Street’s ESG-matching “Values Discovery Tool.“
• MMI/Morningstar Sustainable Investing Initiative, educational resources, workshops, forums and thought leadership.