Forgetting the E in ESG!

Flabbergasted... That accurately describes my feeling upon receiving a weighty 41 page communication through the post from a fund manager, letting me know that their funds were being renamed and rebranded to boost their ESG credentials.

Apparently I held one or more of these funds on their platform (I won’t mention who to save their blushes). The subsequent 40 pages contained a side by side comparison of the old and new funds in excruciating detail until page 32 where I finally found the one fund I was invested in. 

What a dreadful way to communicate the start of their funds ESG journey.

It was also a dreadful communication from a customer service perspective. With all their resources, why not design a letter that clearly references the impacted funds I hold and include only the relevant inserts? At least send it via e-documents which I'm signed up for.

The answer partly lies with clunky and outdated technology used by platforms and fund managers, where they juggle the relatively high costs and longer lead-times of designing and implementing a specific and targeted communication versus sending out a generic communication to everybody asap. In this case ignore the E in ESG and let the customer try and wade through 40 pages and work out what it means for themselves. So disappointing. Especially when there are some great Fintech solutions out there that could help in this space.

A one-page letter referencing the fund I held and referring me to their website for more detailed information would have sufficed. At worst just include the inserts relevant for me, so that’s 3 pages, not 41. I detect the hand of budget and fund launch deadlines overriding customer service and common sense here. I presume this weighty tome went to many thousands of investors. Didn’t somebody see the irony of this before it was approved?

As I write I’m looking out from my home office onto the beautiful Ashdown Forest and wonder how many birch and oak trees were chopped down to send this letter? It’s a depressing thought, but not one that seemed to prick the conscience of the fund manager. With an average of 10,000 A4 paper sheets per tree, this communication was a small woodland.

I really hope we are not heading for an avalanche of similar ESG fund related paper comms (remember those mind-blowing RDR share-class conversion letters we all received several years ago?). There is a better way to communicate to your customers and its specific, its tailored and its digital first.  

I concede that it’s possible the paper used here is of a recycled variety, but typically many brands only include around 50% recycled fibres and let’s not kid ourselves that 100% of this one will make it into future recycled paper. The process is not that efficient sadly and the cycle perpetuates.

Come on... you owe it to your customers to be better than this!