In this podcast and video, I interview Sonya Dreizler, who helps financial service firms implement Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factor investing (or Impact Investing) in their practices. She also helps advisors connect with clients and market their impact investing services.
Sonya is a former financial services executive with 15 years of experience, including as President & CEO of Protected Investors of America, a Broker Dealer and SEC registered Investment Adviser. She started at Protected Investors as an executive assistant in 2004 and took on increasing roles in the firm, eventually becoming the COO, then the President & CEO, and then managed the firm’s acquisition in 2016. She is a Certified Financial Planner professional (CFP) and holds various industry licenses.
Sonya’s website is: http://www.solutionswithsonya.com/
She has a free article about 4 barriers to implementing Impact Investing: http://www.solutionswithsonya.com/whitepaper/
In our interview we discuss what prevents advisors from offering SRI (Socially Responsible Investing) in their practice. I have heard from many clients who had an advisor tell them that their performance will suffer if they have a portfolio that uses ESG factors in evaluating holdings. Other advisors provide minimal ESG investment options for clients seeking these opportunities.
Particularly now, not offering any ESG investment options may hurt a firms practice.
We talk about what prevents individual investors from engaging in SRI when their values are clearly in-line with SRI offerings. We discuss how to educate investors and advisors on how to incorporate SRI into their portfolios and practices and how to convey the work that is being done by SRI funds and the ethical investing community.
I ask Sonya what SRI strategy does she see as being most commonly implemented (mutual funds, individual stocks, separately managed accounts, a mix)?
We finish by discussing how she follows (and reports) impacts from SRI? And how she recommends that advisors report impacts to clients? Or how can investors find out about impacts?
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