Searches for ESG funds increase rapidly – with sustainability issues dominating

Usage of the adviser friendly sustainable investment fund database ‘Fund EcoMarket’ increased sharply over the last six months.

• Fund EcoMarket welcomed 7.9k unique users over the 6 months to 30 June 2020 – compared to 5.5k over the same period in 2019 (source: Google Analytics).
• The average session time was 4.31 minutes.

Commenting on the numbers SRI Services founder Julia Dreblow added:

 ‘I am delighted that usage of our site continues to increase rapidly as this means that more people are looking for information about sustainable, responsible and ethical funds. 

A year on year increase of nearly 50% points to rapidly growing interest and individual investors showing signs of following the institutional investment market boom.

With the support of our fund partners, the site free to use which is important to us as we want to make it as easy as possible for advisers and others to find investments with higher ESG & sustainability standards.

Our hope is that this is a useful contribution toward achieving ‘Net Zero’ and supporting the #BuildBackBetter movement… which although the vocabulary has changed over the years is exactly what the site was set up to do 10 years ago.’

With regard to what people are looking for on the site there were 23,571 individual items selected (clicks) during the first half of 2020 (according to Google Analytics).

The top 50 individual searches are listed below.

This list shows the need for users to mix both financial and ESG factors when searching funds.

In particular it highlights that the dominant area of interest is Sustainability and Environmental Themes (two of our ‘SRI Styles’  labels) – and in particularly the desire to ‘Avoid coal, oil and gas companies’ – being the most searched for individual policy option.