Editor’s note: This article is part of a continuing series in which Paul Ellis, a well-known advisor and consultant on sustainable investing strategies, interviews industry professionals on the topics of millennials and sustainable investing. What follows is an interview with two industry experts from Zevin Asset Management LLC, a global SRI/ESG investment management firm that uses a top-down economically driven approach to build institutional and individual portfolios: Robert Zevin, chairman, chief investment officer and senior portfolio manager; and Sonia Kowal, president and director of socially responsible investing.

To read the first article in the series, click here: /news/the-wise-woman-and-the-millennial-23738.html

To read the second article in the series, click here: /news/millennials-leading-the-way-in-sustainable-investing-24019.html

To read the third article in the series, click here: /news/millennials-mainstreaming-impact-investing-24487.html

 

Paul: Robert, according to your bio, you proudly went to jail during the 1968 Columbia student protests, and in the 80s you wrote and gave public testimony about the effects of anti-apartheid divestment on stock portfolios. Looking at your performance numbers over the last nearly two decades that you have had your own firm, your success as an asset manager and your social justice activism might seem paradoxical to some people in the investment industry.

Robert: Yes, the old argument about whether there’s a detrimental effect to introducing social, environmental or personal values into investing. Many investment professionals have correctly concluded that this has no negative effect on performance. But socially responsible investing (SRI) attracts people whose primary interest and skills are on the social side, so this could be one reason why their good investment results look more unusual.

Paul: Sonia, your first degree was in Zoology.

Sonia: Yes, it was 1999, and I wanted to be David Attenborough and tend to baby lions, but I was relegated to studying worm poop through a microscope. I was studying in Scotland, a financial center, so when a big asset manager was recruiting for their graduate program, I applied.

Paul: You went to work for Baillie Gifford before you had a finance degree?

Sonia: They prefer hiring people with diverse backgrounds to get different views of the investment world. They were also having a hard time attracting women, so I was in the right place at the right time. But I started wrestling with social issues and how they intersected with what I did day-to-day. I didn’t realize that SRI existed. So in 2005, my husband and I quit our jobs to travel around the world.   

Paul: Robert, how did you begin working as a portfolio manager?

Robert: When I started college, I thought I would be a literature major and writer. But I ended up as an economic historian and professor at Berkley and then Columbia. I was also involved in political movements and managing money for relatives and friends on a non-paid amateur basis. After I decided to register as an investment advisor, I began getting socially responsible clients because I was raising money for social causes. They pushed me in that direction rather than the other way around.

Most investment managers are rewarded for good performance in the short term, whereas clients are saving for retirement or running pension funds or endowments with a 100-year time horizon. So I decided that diversifying to avoid loss was more important than adding alpha through performance. What are all the bad things that can happen, and what would we want to own if some do happen? 

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