Impact Investing Offers Opportunity to Wealth Managers

by Robert Rubinstein, Chairman & Founder of TBLI Group.

I have had many conversations with private bankers who manages wealth portfolios, and they all lamented the difficulty of getting HNW clients interested in Impact Investing. They all recount to me the challenges they face in getting HNW clients to become interested in Impact Investing. I have heard this excuse hundreds of times. It is getting boring. This is what I tell them now.

“The reason you can’t seem to convince your client about ESG or Impact Investing, is because you are not good at getting buy in”.” It is hard to convince clients of a new product when you were selling them past products that were the new wonder middle. CDO’s.” “With that track record, it is hard to win back trust and it appears to the client that Wealth Managers are not fully committed. The Private Bankers all seem to live in fear of their clients. They don’t lead them but follow them. How can you engage with your clients, if you are afraid of them (afraid them leaving), you don’t understand values based investing, and you don’t engage with clients on Impact Investing (illiquid investments with a story) that would provide a sense of fulfilment, and you still operate in a ghetto of limited information. The best part is when Private Bankers all tell me “Clients are not interested in Impact Investing”. I laugh my head off. One even went so far as saying “none of our clients (100%) are interested in sustainable investments”. I never encountered anything that has 100% success or failure rate.

Client Engagement

Asset owners who meet with their wealth managers are often confronted with the comment “sorry your portfolio is down, because interest rates are so low”. That conversation is a dead conversation.

It is not inspiring, joyful, or interesting. The liquid part of the portfolio often represents 80-90% of the portfolio. So hearing that 80-90% of your portfolio is down because of low interest rates won’t put a spring in your step.

The part that represents a very small percentage of the portfolio, alternative investments or illiquid investments is the part where wealth managers can really engage, particularly the part called Impact Investment. If you look at the 10-20% of a client’s portfolio and within that you might find a razor thin part that could be considered “impact investing”. It is that tiny part of the portfolio that wealth managers can really engage with the client, and get clients passionate, excited, and most of all a feeling that the wealth managers made the client’s day. Isn’t that something to which to aspire.

It is refreshing to see that most Wealth managers are in one form or another starting to introduce clients to Impact Investing Product. Now instead of saying that the client is not interested, the excuse is there are no quality products at scale. Another fallacy. There are plenty of quality impact investing product at scale. Just need to start exploring other neighbourhoods, and not only your Bloomberg terminal.

You can’t find 100% of anything anywhere who believe the same, unless you are a private banker. How about waking up, smell the roses, engage with your client, gain some fulfilment, and get your bonus?

For the number crunchers who still need convincing.