ESG Investment on the Rise
We work with buy-side organisations of all sizes and strategies and whilst our key areas (Operations, Compliance and Finance & Accounting) don’t tend to have an obvious focus on ESG or ‘Socially Responsible Investing’ more and more candidates are asking either to join firms with a strong ESG focus or for us to find them opportunities with elements of ESG.
Clearly investors have been demanding increased transparency surrounding their investments for a number of years now but equally prospective candidates wants to work for firms with sustainable and responsible investment strategies.
UBS Asset Management, the SFr792bn (€685bn) Swiss manager, received 6,200 applications for fewer than 25 jobs when it set up its responsible investment team in 2015.
Moreover, we want to work with organisations with a clear focus on ESG. As our workforce becomes younger and more environmentally and socially conscious, inevitably our client base will too.
We partner with start-ups and boutique asset managers and it’s not just the larger corporate firms that are taking a lead in this area. Candidates looking for an ESG focused position should remain open minded as to the size of organisation they’re seeking to join.
Chris Hohn, the founder of TCI Fund Management, is outspoken in his criticism of firms not doing enough to tackle their own carbon emissions. Last week he said “Coal is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions globally and the risks of its continued use in the power sector are not being adequately addressed by regulators and the financial system” and he is launching a campaign designed to starve coal plants of their financing.
We recently worked with a London based start-up fund with a focus on climate change and ESG investment strategies who wanted to hire an Operations Analyst.
Demand for the position was very high in spite of the fact that the firm had yet to start trading. Typically, their requirements were high and they needed someone with strong programming skills – a difficult skill to find within junior operations candidates.
For more information on opportunities across the buy-side, please do contact me for a confidential discussion.