Ketan Patel, Chairman Force for Good, talks to Peter Harrison, Group Chief Executive Officer, Schroders plc, at the 7th World Investment Forum on 18-22 Oct 2022, discussing the key challenges facing the world today and the finance industry’s role in addressing these.

On the most important set of challenges facing the world, especially in meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: “I’m a great believer that this is about mobilizing capital. It’s about mobilizing capital, aligning government policy, and creating an environment for the change to happen quickly. To my mind, the urgency that’s required to make that change happen is it sits with people sitting within businesses to start affecting change. We’ve got to build the biggest industry in the history of mankind, and we’ve got less than 30 years to do it.”

On responsible investment allocation and funding solutions: “At the end of the day, our job is to assess the externalities of a business for fiduciary obligations that many clients are under. We need to be very clear that accounting profit is a pretty poor measure of what a business contributes to broader society. To my mind, our role is to have a think about what a business contributes in aggregate with their version of profit, but also the cost of the carbon they produce, the cost of diabetes they produce, the cost of the social benefit, of the training maybe they give their employees. That holistic view is, to my mind, real profit.”