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Harnessing the ‘appetite for change’ Mindful Money CEO Barry Coates has a singular focus: educating and enabling investors to invest in a more positive future for the world. BY DANIEL SMITH
W
ith the rising popularity of sustainable investing it is easy to forget where this kind of thinking all started. One man who hasn’t forgotten is the founder and CEO of Mindful Money, Barry Coates. He remembers where it started because he was there. His career has been a long line of projects that have used finance to champion sustainability and social good. The latest iteration may be his most powerful tool for change yet. Coates explains that: “Mindful Money is a charity we established in order to try to shift investment funds from what could be euphemistically called ‘bad stuff’ to the ‘good stuff’.” Its goal sounds 012 | ASSET OCTOBER 2020
relatively simple, but the wider impacts of the project represent a revolutionary change in the way investors consider the social impacts of their investments. This is a change that Coates has been pushing for almost his entire career: “These really big concepts have been around for a long time. I was involved in ethical investing in the UK in the early 1990s after what was called the Earth Summit in 1992, where the whole sustainability movement originated from. I've been waiting for it to become wildly popular, and it hasn't done so. Until now.” Recent years have seen a change in the waters around sustainable investing that Coates puts down to the research finally
catching up to what ethical investors have known for years: “When the research came in it showed that it is really important to consider systemic risk, which is not priced accurately by the market. This kind of approach said that, ‘well, actually, if a company has bad environmental performance, that's a financial risk as well as an environmental risk’.” Equating social and environmental risks with financial risks has now entered the mainstream. Coates points to the European Union now having regulations on sustainable investing, the New Zealand government has announced that managed funds over $1 billion must
