Impact Investing Influencers: George Gay

US SIF — the Sustainable Investment Forum is a leading voice advancing sustainable investing across all asset classes. The forum says its mission is to rapidly shift investment practices toward sustainability, focusing on long-term investment and the generation of positive social and environmental impacts.

Its members represent $5 trillion in assets under management or advisement and include investment management and advisory firms, mutual fund companies, ​asset owners, data and research firms, financial planners and advisors, broker-dealers, banks, credit unions, community development financial institutions and nonprofit associations.

Equities News caught up with influential members of US SIF at the organization’s recent Forum 2024 in Chicago.

George Gay, CEO, First Affirmative Financial Network

Tell us a little about yourself and your work.

I’ve been leading First Affirmative since 1986, and we’ve been specializing in especially responsible and sustainable investing since 1988.  We currently have about 70 advisors around the country that work with us. We have our most exciting product, which is Values Aligned Direct Index solutions, which helps us customize a portfolio based on a client’s values more than ever before and deliver high quality, competitive investment outcomes as well. And we can do this for somebody with only $25,000 to invest, which is very new.

How have you seen the values-based portfolio construction space evolve over your career?

For the past 30 years, we’ve been trying to convince people that you could do social screening on a portfolio without having a negative effect on performance and risk. Technology has come so far now, and there are now so many things that people have concerns about, that we have to go the other way. I had a coach who said, you can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything. And that’s the thing now, is that some people are picking so many values preferences that it will affect what we can do. So we have to kind of say, in some cases, you have to make some choices.

And just as one simple example, one of the categories that people might select is women on boards and in C suite positions. Another choice is best places to work for women. That’s a less restrictive category, because when you think about it, you want to support women in on boards and C suites, but if you use that as a screening process, it takes out so many names. So we tell people that we understand that’s what you want, but you’re going to get a better portfolio if you pick the best workplaces for women.

What are you most excited about over the next 6-12 months in this space?

Well, frankly, just to do an in person event and see people face to face and spend time with them. I’m never going to be a proponent of zoom meetings. Zoom is better than telephone, but face to face is the most important thing. When you go somewhere and you see 100 people that you know, that you haven’t seen, there’s no other substitute for it.

Check out all the Impact Investing Influencers.