Our first conference!

We’re thrilled to be attending the inaugural Goodstock sustainable financial planning conference in Edinburgh on Thursday 19th September 2024.

On Wednesday Chris, Ell, and Rachel will board the early train from Kings Cross to Edinburgh for a two day adventure. Although we’re there courtesy of Ayres Punchard, who we all work for at the moment, this will be our first chance to promote Antithesis Research. Business cards carrying a QR code to link to this website are ready, designed by AdaMay and printed by a B Corp printer using vegetable based inks on sustainable and recycled card.

Chris is on the first panel of the day debating ‘How can finance professionals act to address the risks that climate change brings to the financial system and our clients?’ Here’s a preview of his speech:

As finance professionals we need to ask our clients a pivotal question: Are you happy to be complicit in the activities of companies that are causing the rapidly escalating climate disaster, or are responsible for untold human misery, suffering and environmental destruction, all in the name of the transition to net zero?

A just transition is vital for global peace and security. If the transition is carried out at the expense of less wealthy and less powerful nations, forced to supply the raw materials and still suffer the consequences of climate change and enjoy none of the benefits of the transition, then societal collapse, forced mass global migration and armed conflict will result. This will cause intolerable living conditions for everyone and cannot be ignored by financial planners or investment managers when advising their clients.

So, financial advisers and investment managers have an important role in educating clients about their responsibilities as shareholders to ensure a just transition that does not eventually pose such risks to us all.

It is important to understand that share ownership has largely lost its meaning. Individual shareholders no longer regard themselves as owners with any responsibility for the actions and behaviours of the companies that they own.

This has not happened by accident. Companies don’t want shareholders to take responsibility. They just want their capital. The capitalist mantra in an age of mass share ownership has become ‘give us the money and shut up’. We think that has to change.

For financial advisers, developing long term, often intergenerational, relationships with their clients, is instrumental in their business’s long term success. That type of relationship demands that we offer clients a choice not to be complicit in poor and often deceptive corporate activity. Without that choice we run a significant risk that that our client relationships will eventually be damaged. We are there to lead the way not to follow. It has to be part of the financial advisers role to demonstrate suitability of the investment proposition. The complicit nature of share ownership is not something we should be ignoring or covering up. As part of that work we need to educate clients to better understand their potential power as shareholders and enable them to facilitate the change that most want to see happen.

To challenge poor corporate behaviour, investors have to be armed with accurate, full, and well evidenced information about the companies they are invested in. Not biased information provided by the companies themselves, but information from all available sources, fact checked and drawn together into one fully referenced report that highlights the risks posed by the negative impacts caused by the company’s behaviour and activities.

Very often these are the very things that they company does not want anyone to know about. This means the research has to be rigorous and detailed. It has to be evidenced and linked to internationally agreed standards. We use the 10 principles of the United Nations Global Compact as our yardstick. The report can then be used to facilitate more effective engagement by fund management groups looking after clients investments or for shareholder action in directly challenging companies. In extreme cases they can be used to call for divestment. They can also be used to generate publicity through media reporting that in some instances can have a better chance of shaming companies into changing their ways.

One of the major issues of our time is the way in which companies and institutions seek to blame consumers, citing consumer choice as the main reason for their environmentally damaging commercial activities and negative impacts.

Consumers actually have very little choice. They are massively influenced by marketing and advertising as well as disinformation about products. Marketing budgets are big for a reason. The corrupt use of scientific experts by major polluters and producers of harmful products, in order to present their industries as ‘clean, green, and unharmful’ is evidence of the way that many corporations are prepared to lie to consumers.

Consumers are often also shareholders, either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, pension schemes and their institutions endowment portfolios. This gives them great power and we need to show them how they can use that power to counter the erroneous notion that consumer choice is at the heart of all corporate misconduct. We have the ability to hand the power back to consumers, many of whom are also shareholders, enabling them to challenge companies’ negative behaviours and activities, many of which are an anathema to the average client.

The big question is… can he deliver this in the 5 minutes he’s been given!