Ethical Investment Advice

Affluent individuals in the UK are increasingly turning to ethical investment products, a survey discovered earlier this week.

With the number of millionaires and high net worth people on the rise in the UK, almost one million British citizens now have over £200,000 in liquid assets.

Market analyst group Datamonitor said they expected the amount of people in the UK with this amount of assets to rise to over 1.3 million people by 2009.

Simultaneously, environmental issues and socially responsible investing were becoming increasingly popular among wealthy investors. Banks in turn were found to adapt to these trends in a bid to secure more customers.

Oksana Selezneva, the author of the report, noted that banks were reviewing their products and services, taking into account the ever changing “needs and attitudes of high net worth individuals.”

The past two years have seen more UK banks offer ethical investments, some institutions going as far to launching specialist ethical investment divisions to cope with the matter and provide advice.

Selezneva added that ethical investment today was as much about the positive investment aspect as it was about negative, in that the original ideal was solely on providers steering steer of companies which make cigarettes or use sweatshop labour.

Holding sizable stakes in major companies, investment managers today have considerable voting power, allowing them to encourage firms to act more responsibly.

Date: 20.10.05