How Investing Pros Avoid ‘Greenwashing’

“Greenwashing” — or making misleading claims about the environmental benefits of a product, usually bonds — has garnered a lot of attention of late, especially as socially responsible investing took a hit when private equity baron and impact investing maven Bill McGlashan, former CEO of investment firm TPG, was charged in the Operation Varsity Blues scandal that has rocked the U.S. elite college and ultra-wealthy worlds (McGlashan denies involvement).

Though there are firms that grab up so-called “green bonds” without much research, managers we spoke to — an asset management firm portfolio manager, a bank asset manager and a director of a nonprofit that focuses on SRI — all say they know greenwashing exists, but note it can be avoided by doing the necessary homework.

Steve Liberatore, portfolio manager of TIAA Investments’ multibillion-dollar fixed income team, noted that the firm has been in SRI for decades.

“We’ve been buying green bonds before they were labeled as ‘green bonds,’” Liberatore told ThinkAdvisor.

He adds that his group “doesn’t care if a security is labeled a ‘green bond,’ we focus on the underlying use of the security. We get impact metrics.” And they dig down to see how the environment is benefiting from these bonds.

“The concept of greenwashing is negative, not only for issuers but for investors,” he says, adding that “green” is not an SEC-trigger word, so anyone could issue a so-called green bond without really being one.

Therefore, bonds bought by TIAA don’t need to be green bonds, per se. He notes that with the nature of fixed income, the firm has the ability to control how assets are utilized and what outcomes are derived. Its size also allows TIAA to have input into the issuer product. “It’s a unique characteristic of the fixed income market,” Liberatore says.

“Firms need to focus on how dollars are being used,” he says, adding investments must have a disciplined approach to reporting. “We’ve looked at plenty of transactions but when we were unable to get the impact reporting,” they walked away.

Advisor Wariness

Liberatore says there are three main reasons that advisors remain reticent about impact investing: beliefs that the strategy sacrifices performance; still isn’t mainstream; and, at least with fixed income, many believe it can’t make a difference. Yet “it provides an opportunity to speak to a client on a holistic level … it gets away from raw numbers, and asks, what are you passionate about?”

Catherine Banat, RBC Global Asset Management’s director of U.S. responsible investing, agrees, and says there is “a gap between what clients want and what advisors are comfortable doing or informed about.” She says there’s two ways to looking at impact investing: There’s a “value” component as well as a “values” aspect, and they are easy to confuse in the marketplace.

The difference, she explains: Say an advisor is looking at a tobacco company and needs to determine if there is “contingent liability,” that is, the danger the company could be sued. “You may decide that incremental risk or that event risk is too uncertain to evaluate value,” she told ThinkAdvisor. “That’s the value discussion.”