Why we’re looking forward to the upcoming Make My Money Matter campaign

We were thrilled to have front row seats for a recent video conference with film screenwriter, producer and director Richard Curtis. He has a long list of film credits to his name, but the subject was all about how moving your money has the power to change the world a subject close to our hearts here at Path Financial.

In a fascinating event hosted by The Conduit Club and presented by Gillian Tett of the FT the audience were treated to Richard’s plans for a new campaign bringing awareness to the public of the power of moving their pension and other savings where it will make a difference to the climate: Make My Money Matter, which will go live later this year.

Richard walked us through his personal journey of fundraising and influence from Red Nose Day, through government influence to his current epiphany and revelation on how we can all shape the future of capital for the biggest impact possible. Richard’s journey shares an almost identical parallel to my own as founder of Path Financial – the realisation that we, the investing public are the ones who can and will instigate change. We just needed to wake up to our own power. Private pension funds in the UK are worth around £6tn. That’s £6,000,000,000,000. In technical parlance that is “a chunk of change” and collectively it can drive a lot of influence.

The only problem with asking people to move their pension money to sustainable funds is how do you do it? The IFA community are woefully behind the curve on this and almost inevitably their investment management approaches are not set up with any ethical or sustainability metrics baked-in. This means that there is not a functional system to plug clients into that demand this change. All we have are a bunch of square pegs on one hand and round holes on the other. So investors will get fobbed-off with excuses and greenwash. We urge the IFA community to wake up to what their clients are demanding. If they don’t, then we are very happy to welcome their former clients and staff to join our movement in making impact investing the “new normal”.

As Richard phrased it so pithily, we need to “build back better” when we get out of the Coronavirus lock-down. In fact, thinking about where your money is invested and why is one really productive thing many of us could and should find the time to do now we have extra time at home.