In the latest episode of Dollars & Change: The Expert’s Guide to Sustainable & Responsible Investing, host duties were reversed as Terra McBride, Chief Marketing Officer at Prime Capital Financial (PCF), the parent company of Earth Equity Advisors, interviewed me during PCF’s Prime Week.
Terra McBride: Talk a little bit about the history of SRI and maybe even define what SRI is.
Peter Krull: When I started in this business 20 years ago SRI stood for socially responsible investing. It’s taken a bunch of iterations over the years.
We can take a look during the seventies and eighties during the apartheid regime down in South Africa, and investors didn’t want to have a part of that. Continue forward into the Green Revolution, Earth Day started and people wanted to invest in a way that was in alignment with what their values were. They wanted to invest green, and so these things just slowly came together.
And traditionally, what socially responsible investing was three parts. It was screening. So you screened in the kind of companies you wanted, and you screened out the companies you didn’t want. It was shareholder advocacy. So, using your shares, your proxy votes to actually have an impact on companies. And community investing, making sure some of that money went back into communities to have a positive impact.
TM: How are you defining what we’re calling the evolution of SRI?
PK: This is really where we’re going to be trying to make a push within the investing space. And the next iteration that we see is sustainable, resilient and innovation investing. And the reason I’ve talked for a second about sustainability, I talked a little bit about resilience and innovation, is really what ties it all together. I mean, it’s what really defines this generation.
The Europeans like to say that sustainable investing is just simply investing Because when we think about the due diligence that goes into picking companies that are more sustainable, more resilient, more innovative, that’s what we should be doing anyway.
Watch the complete interview:
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