$35 trillion dollars of assets under management claim inclusion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into their investment strategies. However, their portfolio managers must navigate imperfect data sets to measure the impact of a company’s ESG factors. Additionally, investors and regulators must navigate mounting skepticism of ESG claims, trying to separate the green from the greenwash. They’re positioned in a bind — beholden to growing shareholder appetite for returns on sustainable and value-driven portfolios, while simultaneously competing against benchmark funds that focus only on short-term performance.

This Wharton ESG Executive Certificate for Financial Professionals combines Wharton’s world-class financial acumen with the critical insights from award-winning Wharton faculty pioneering ESG research. The result is a powerful, actionable toolkit for investment professionals to implement, measure, model, and optimize ESG-asset integration in their portfolios for sustained value generation.

Program Experience

Highlights and Key Outcomes

In the Wharton ESG Executive Certificate for Financial Professionals program, you will:

• Enhance your ability to integrate ESG factors into diverse investment strategies across asset classes
• Identify climate leaders and laggards across industries and those poised to seize transition opportunities
• Understand how complex regulations give rise to financial markets for carbon and renewable energy certificates, and how this impacts the profitability of various industries
• Analyze financial implications of different political risks and future scenarios from geopolitical to national to local levels
• Anticipate ESG shareholder activism and engagement as well as their impacts

The Wharton ESG Executive Certificate for Financial Professionals is comprised of one month of introductory content (Wharton ESG Essentials) immediately followed by an additional month of specialized investing content. This advanced certificate is designed to quickly catapult financial leaders and professionals to the forefront of ongoing ESG decision making, empowering them to act as informed, prepared catalysts for change.

Experience and Impact

In the Wharton ESG Executive Certificate for Financial Professionals program, you will build on the foundation acquired in Wharton ESG Essentials to dive deeper into investment strategies that tap ESG data and insight — be it through accepted best practices or emerging levers. Whether you pursue fundamental analysis, value-based investing, factor models, screens or tilts, quant models, event-based trading strategies, impact investing, or thematically oriented focused efforts on different ESG factors, you will see the rapidly evolving frontier of the field and develop the skills needed to push it forward. The discussion will also look beyond publicly traded equities to private markets, corporate and public fixed income, real estate, and alternative investment assets.

You will gain a better understanding of climate finance — how carbon markets and others drive the energy transition, and how to identify firms benefiting from climate transition tailwinds as well as headwinds within and across industries. The program will examine perspectives on the green technology and innovation sector, where cost curves are rapidly evolving, threatening to sunset some industries while accelerating the growth of new ones. And you will learn to map green supply chains to see the bottlenecks that will generate short-term inflationary pressures and medium- to long-term investment opportunities. You will also learn about the rapidly growing market for green bonds and what they can and can’t offer in terms of impact.

The program will also explore geopolitical scenarios for the world economy over the next decade and their implications for portfolio construction. And from a governance standpoint, you will learn about the risk factors that make some firms more likely to face shareholder activism and less capable or successful in their response. You will also develop tools and tactics for more sophisticated engagement with firms to unlock value.

Session topics include:

• ESG and Impact Investing
• Climate Finance and Economics
• Shareholder Activism
• Socio-Political Risk

Those interested in learning more about Wharton ESG Essentials, or additional ESG specialized certificates, can visit here.

Participants who have successfully completed Wharton ESG Essentials as a standalone program can apply for and enroll in a certificate track within one year of Essentials completion.