Steve Waygood, the chief responsible investment officer at Aviva Investors, a global asset manager with more than 344 billion British pounds ($451 billion) in investments, says he has “a contention with the financial industry.”
The vast majority of the company’s clients, ranging from personal pension and insurance holders to corporations, do not understand finance, Waygood believes.
“People do not demand financial products that shape the world they want to retire into,” Waygood recently explained to Devex. “So, the question, ‘How do you harness markets to finance the Sustainable Development Goals’ is a pretty challenging one. People do not understand how markets work, let alone how the SDGs work. The dialogue has taken a long time to get to anything like a sophisticated level.”