We know that many of our clients are concerned that their investments are made toward sustainable objectives. Many of our clients already invest with a purpose and ensure that their monies do not go toward investments that harm the Earth or humanity.

Our focus on ESG investing started as a challenge from our clients. Many of our clients felt a duty to their children and grandchildren, and many younger clients sense the urgency today. One of our clients was particularly horrified by the school shootings in the US and told us that they wanted to ensure that none of their investments went toward gun makers.

As investors we also started to see that investing with an ESG lens is also good investing. Good governance particularly influences the share price of a public corporations. The Tanager Wealth ESG Philosophy is a sustainability centric strategy that seeks to mitigate ESG risk by factoring in a broad range of sustainability criteria. The values that Tanager focuses on are climate change, human rights, corporate ethics, women’s rights, sustainable agriculture and reducing poverty.

However, there are many challenges with ESG investing and we wanted a specialist firm to help us implement ESG criteria on our portfolios. Our ESG partner would have to be US and UK friendly and available for American expats. Tanager Wealth utilizes two main platforms to invest clients’ funds, these platforms have slightly different ESG capabilities. For our clients investing funds in the US, we partner with the Sustainable Investing firm Ethic Inc (www.ethic.com). With our partnership with Ethic, those with $250,000 or more to invest can integrate ESG investing into their taxable and tax-deferred portfolios.

Ethic has data at the core of their ESG decision making. They can turn quantitative data into real world impact. For those who have $250,000-$750,000 to invest your portfolio will align with the values set by Tanager. For those with $750,000 and more to invest we can work with you to build a bespoke strategy focussing on your ESG investing priorities. Ethic will then design a customized portfolio, aligned to your values. We can also ensure that ‘do not buy’ and ‘do not sell’ restrictions are honored. Tanager provides US and UK tax reporting, and we can also show aggregated Family reporting. An Ethic strategy can be used in US Trust, charity, brokerage, and IRA accounts.

For clients with funds investing in the UK we incorporate a number of ESG funds into our GBP model portfolios. We select funds that utilise a screening process to exclude companies with the following business activities:

• Controversial weapons
• Thermal coal
• Nuclear weapons
• Tobacco
• UN Global Compact violators
• Oil sands
• Civilian firearms

These funds are incorporated into standard model portfolios which also includes green bonds.