Promoting Green Investments Within the Retail Sector

Abstract: The environmental problem has become more prominent in the last decade, and in the recent years there has been a number of alarming reports published on this topic. In order to fight the climate change, the financial industry can play a key role by directing their investments towards green projects and sustainable companies, pushing companies to participate in the transformation to a sustainable world. The development of issued green bonds is evidence on that the financial market has started to allocate more money in the green market, and this development is expected to continue going forward. The development is mainly driven by institutional capital, with only very little support from the Retail segment. Hence, the aim of this thesis is to provide the market with possible solutions on how to enhance the volume of capital invested in green products from this segment. Semi-structured interviews with 8 stakeholders on the market, together with seminar discussions on a TBLI Sustainability conference and thoughts obtained through a Sustainable Advisory Board at Nasdaq constitutes the foundation of this report in order to deduce patterns to why investors choose to invest or not invest in green instruments, as well as deducing the existing problems with the current market. The opinions are compiled and discussed in aspects concerning framework issues, definition issues, future outlook and policies. Our commissioner Nasdaq has helped guided the focus of this thesis. Our interviews combined with current literature works as the foundation to the findings on the specific area which could be of interest to all stakeholders on the financial market, but more specifically to investors, financial institutions and the government. Key findings of this thesis shows that the market in general is in need of clear guidance from the government in order to be able to adapt to the changing world. Further, the lack of a standardised framework and assessment of green investments leads to low transparency and problems with measuring impact. This describes why private investors say they do value sustainability, but fail to invest in it. Better transparency and reporting would make it easier showing the impact of the investment, which ultimately would affect private investors in a positive way as investors valuing sustainability would obtain a tangible sustainability measure on their investment, resulting in that their utility from the investment is maximised. In order to enhance the market in the current state, the authors of this report states that government support towards fintech companies contributing to the development of transparency, reporting and impact would be of interest. The authors see that such a subsidy would yield a lot of value to all stakeholders on the market, including the Retail sector.