A&I Wealth Management > Blog > Investment Advice > ESG Investing and Earth Day

On Earth Day, 2019, we launched a three-part plan to do our part to increase our client experience, and help the planet, too.

GO PAPERLESS

First, it’s never been easier to go paperless with your investments. Click here to save thousands of pages of print (and hassle) per year.

Chads Pic 3

Chad Harmon collects 6 months of paper documents from a valued client.

USE OUR NEW eSignature

Second, we’re launching our eSignature campaign. In beta test for some time, we will start asking you to use email and phone calls to verify many, if not most, of the common work we do for you. Clients who have experienced the eSignature are raving about it. We hope you will too.

USE YOUR INVESTMENTS AS YOUR VOICE

And finally, this Earth Day A & I launches a suite of investments we call Social Considerations (SC) investments. Commonly called ESG (Environmental, Social and corporate Governance) investing, our SC investments incorporate both financial and non-financial factors.

We invest in companies that are attractive both from a fundamental perspective (e.g., earnings growth, valuations, return potential, and more), combined with those companies who are also best in class when it comes to their impact on the environment, society, their employees, and more. We believe our integrated approach, combining both financial and non-financial factors, improves the overall quality of investments and rewards those businesses that are better stewards of society’s shared resources.

Perhaps the biggest difference between our SC investments and other ESG options in the marketplace is the due diligence of our research team. After years of exhaustive research from our research partners, we are confident these portfolios have the potential to remain strategy-consistent and act with high conviction—the factors that all of our research partners agree make a difference.

Our goal is to optimize investment performance while doing good in our SC models. Many other companies providing SC investments are based on specific ethical guidelines, such as religion, personal values, or political beliefs. Often, this involves making a trade-off between ethical values and financial returns. Our approach is to be less restrictive, but also to focus our investments on those companies with strong environmental, social and corporate governance characteristics. We believe that by doing so it can lead to better outcomes over time.

For more information, contact your financial advisor at A & I Financial Services.

About the author

Karl Frank, Certified Financial Planner ®, MSF, MBA, MA, is the President of A&I Financial Services LLC, a local business that specializes in wealth management, insurance planning, and retirement planning. Karl cares for business owners and the businesses that care for them. Learn More about Karl.