Understanding ethical funds and sustainable investment

This website – and its sister site sriServices.co.uk – were set up to help financial advisers (and colleagues) to offer advise on sustainable, responsible and ethical investment more easily and more often. Fund EcoMarket is designed to sit alongside other tools used by advisers, exploring and presenting only the ‘ethical’ aspects of offering investment advice. In brief this site includes the following:

• a fact find tool that sits separately from the rest of the site – meaning that an adviser can send the ‘SRI StyleFinder’ url to a client
• an SRI fund research tool – that enables advisers to select funds on numerous individual or combined bases (by financial criteria, by SRI style or by ethical, social and environmental filter option)
• report generation options for both the ‘SRI StyleFinder’ fact find tool and the ‘Fund EcoMarket’ fund research tool – for advisers’ audit trail

Funds have been grouped into what we call ‘SRI Styles’ in order to make the advice process more straightforward.  Our unique system of grouping funds together in ways that are ‘ethically similar’ makes this somewhat complex area significantly easier to discuss. The additional filters, text and links supplied by fund managers offer additional support information that help advises to offer more ‘bespoke’ advice when needed.

Why ask supplementary ‘ethical fact find’ questions?

Recent FCA Fact Find Guidance includes reference to the need to understand clients’ ethical and political views – as examples of when a single core fact find may not be sufficient.