Growing interest in sustainable investing is turning into action.
The trend is especially pronounced among Millennial investors, according to a new survey from the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing. In the survey, “Sustainability Signals,” 86% of active Millennial investors expressed interest in the field, while six of 10 investors in that group say they’ve made at least one sustainable investment in the last year.
In the survey, which takes stock of the attitudes, perceptions and behaviors of a 1,000 individual investors towards sustainable investing, three out of four said they’re interested in sustainable investing, a slight increase from Morgan Stanley’s 2015 poll. “Consumers and investors alike are now more than ever factoring sustainability issues into their investment decisions,” said Morgan Stanley’s Audrey Choi. Here are few other “sustainability signals” ImpactAlpha has been tracking:
- Global sustainable-investment assets have hit $23 trillion, up 25% in two years. (This figure includes negatively and positively screened public equities, green bonds and impact and community investments.)
- A dozen new ESG funds have launched since January and Morningstar has seen a four-fold increase in the use of ESG data on its fund rating platform.
- New flows of investor capital into ESG funds in just the first half of 2017 have topped net flows for 2014 or 2015 and are on pace to top 2016 inflows, says Morningstar.
- Betterment and Wealthfront, two of the biggest digital investment advisors, recently added ESG stock portfolios.
- Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led a $3.35 million roundinto OpenInvest, an impact investing robo-advisor. The firm recently launched a #WithRefugees theme to its investment platform to allow investors to invest in publicly listed companies that have forward-thinking policies towards refugees.
