Mindful Money founder and co-CEO Barry Coates is retiring from the ethical investment charity he launched in 2019 for health reasons, after seven years leading its work to bring greater transparency to New Zealanders' investments.

Coates will remain involved as an adviser during the transition, while fellow co-CEO Kate Vennell will become interim chief executive.

Mindful Money board chair and Carina Capital managing director Paul Richardson said the board will support the organisation through the transition and review Mindful Money’s strategy, structure and leadership needs for the future.

“The Board is hugely grateful to Barry for his pioneering leadership and contribution, developing a unique charity with a strong team to achieve transparency and real-world change. [We] will continue to work alongside Kate and the team to build on these foundations.”

Turning transparency into action

Speaking to Good Returns at the recent Responsible Investment Association Australasia (RIAA) conference in Auckland, Coates said Mindful Money was born from his concerns about climate change, a belief that finance could be a force for positive change and frustration at the lack of transparency available to investors.

“I'd tried to find an ethical investment portfolio for myself. I had a master's in finance and management from Yale University, but I had to give up after a week. I could not get the data. There was no transparency. And what data there was, wasn't comparable because everyone was using different terms to mean different things and it was all PR speak,” he said.

Having worked in senior sustainability and development roles with WWF in the UK and Oxfam in New Zealand, established the sustainability programme at the University of Auckland Business School and served as a Green Party MP, Coates said he’s long been interested in how economic and financial systems could drive social and environmental change.

The final piece of the puzzle, however, came through research he conducted with RIAA in 2018. The joint survey found strong demand for ethical investing but identified two major barriers: a lack of objective information and difficulty comparing investment options. Those findings became the foundation for Mindful Money, said Coates, and later evolved into the annual Voices of Aotearoa research programme, which continues to inform much of the ethical investment charity's work today.

Using portfolio data from more than 1,000 KiwiSaver and managed funds, Mindful Money analyses companies held within those funds and freely shares the information so New Zealanders can find investment options that align with their values. This transparency has had a significant impact on both the public and fund managers' behaviour, said Coates. “Providing transparency of information empowers people to make good financial decisions. One of the standards for financial advice is that ‘you should know your client’ and part of knowing your client is knowing what they want to avoid in their investments or what positive things do they want to invest in.” 

Though he’s proud of Mindful Money’s reach and impact, he’s disappointed about a lack of action on climate change. Investors should be withdrawing capital from fossil fuel companies unless they are genuinely transitioning towards renewable energy, he said, but sadly that’s not happening. “And that’s stupid from a financial risk perspective, let alone a climate perspective.”