Why subscribe to “The Sustainable Investor” ?
“If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere" - Henry Kissinger
Keeping up with all of the sustainability transitions is tough, there is just so much to track. And so much of what you need to know comes from fields of expertise different from your own.
Sometimes it feels like this - and the sheer mass of things you need to know is growing every day.
Wouldn't it be really useful to have someone working alongside you who understood both finance and sustainability, and who could say ...
if you want to make your sustainability actions financially viable - this is what you need to know, and this is why it's important?
Sustainability Professionals
Increasingly Sustainability Professionals need to understand the world of finance - on top of all of the other things they need to do. We can help you understand how the world of finance thinks about the choices we face, enabling you to more effectively mobilise the financial support that will be essential to making your sustainability projects viable.
Finance Professionals
And, Finance Professionals face a similar challenge. You know that sustainability is becoming increasingly important to your clients and stakeholders. But, how do you get past ESG scoring, which you know is only part of the solution. By bringing our extensive financial experience to bear, we can help you better communicate how your investment decisions will positively contribute to solving some of society's biggest challenges, while still delivering a fair financial return.
What is the challenge we can overcome together?
We all know that if the planet is to achieve its decarbonisation and transition targets, we need to engage the private sector. Just to deliver net zero, we need to invest $4-5 trillion every year out to 2030. This is over double what we invest now. On top of this we also need to invest to preserve and rehabilitate our environment, social systems and biodiversity.
Governments and society have an important role to play but they cannot do this on their own.
One massive challenge in delivering this is that sustainability and finance sit in very different silos. They not only use different words, they think differently, often very differently.
We need to transition sustainability into mainstream finance. We also need to bridge the gaps. So how do we do this?
We learn to speak each other’s language, we learn each other’s culture - we learn new perspectives
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Finance people think in detail. They look at market size, competitive advantage, supply chains, production processes, investment needs, risks and potential financial returns. If we want them to fully buy into the required transitions, we need to pitch investment in a way that they relate to.
Sustainability professionals, lobby groups, and civil servants need to learn the language and perspective of finance.
Plus investor relations professionals and asset owners need to learn how to connect sustainability with business objectives and strategy.
This is not going to be easy, the transitions will impact nearly every aspect of our economic system, from agriculture, through industry, transport, and energy systems to health and human rights.
This is where we come in. We demystify the changes our financial systems will go thorough, reducing the noise and the greenwashing. We simplify, so you can see how to apply the lessons to your work, your investing, your engagement with companies and governments, and your local community. We help you navigate - what is investable now and what needs to change to make the key transitions investable in the future.
How do we do this? Through a series of blogs and online content that draws together the bigger picture, with the important detail. That explains the tradeoffs, risks and compromises as well as the potential returns.
Who we are. The Sustainable Investor is a team of experts, with a broad range of knowledge and experience, mostly focused on finance and company strategy. What drew us together is a passion for sustainability. We want to make it happen, which means making it financeable.
The two founders, Sandy Jayaraj and Steven Bowen have between them over 50 years of finance industry expertise, and perhaps equally importantly more than a decade of sustainability experience.
Sandy is an experienced C-Suite executive and leader with broad multi-national industry and corporate experience. He had a 25-year career in financial markets at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Morgan Stanley enhanced by four years as COO, then CEO building Curation Corp into a trusted sustainability intelligence enterprise. He is also a published journalist having written on emerging themes and sustainability for various publications including IR Magazine, Illuminem and Energy World, a publication of the Energy Institute. Sandy is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and studied Engineering and Management Studies at Queens’ College, Cambridge University.
Steven has built nearly 30 years' experience in the finance and investing world, including periods in corporate finance, debt markets, broking, and as a buy side portfolio manager. His focus is on the importance of company strategy, and how to construct investment cases in an uncertain world (and the transitions are the biggest uncertainty of all), plus he is a massive advocate for active engagement. He is a qualified engineer (Canterbury University NZ), with an MBA from London Business School & the post graduate FT Non-Executive diploma. He is also a columnist at illuminem.
What do you get
We aim to give you the tools to create a map of the opportunities, the risks and the trade-offs, the unforeseen consequences, and the potential financial returns, cutting through the lobbying, the noise, and the confusion. To be clear, this is not financial advice and we don’t recommend funds or individual investments.
We publish two Quick Insights a week, plus three or four longer Perspectives and Deep Dives every month. Plus a weekly Bridging the Gap - our concise summary of everything we have published over the last week, plus a recap of some of the important issues. And our thought piece - Sunday Brunch, which helps you stand back and see what is important and what is just noise. And a lot of what is important just doesn’t get covered properly elsewhere, as its complex, you need to understand finance AND sustainability to see it. So over 200 blogs a year.
The subscription for Bridging the Gap and Sunday Brunch is free. The Quick Insights (2 per week, so over 100 per year) cost you less than a pound a week. And our Professional subscription, which is all of the above plus a Perspectives and a Long Blog every week, will still cost only a little more than a flat white in one of those boutique coffee houses.
That has got to be worth it for the access it provides to independent thought on sustainable investing.
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