Your Money Is Doing Something. The Question Is Whether You Know What.

Published: 2022  |  Perspective updated: 2025

A few years ago I collaborated with Rewired Earth on something that felt deceptively simple: a short quiz asking people what they cared most about in the world. Climate. Poverty. Equality. Health. The seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals, laid out as a series of choices, each one asking you to weigh your own values against everyone else's.

It took one to two minutes. That was the point.

We were trying to understand what consumers actually cared about — not what they said they cared about in a focus group, but what they would choose when asked to prioritise between things that all genuinely mattered. The ambition behind it was real: to use that insight to inform how a large financial services organisation shaped its strategy, and to help people understand that their investments weren't sitting in a neutral void. They were doing something. Somewhere. Whether they knew it or not.

That question — do people know what their money is doing? — is one I still think about a lot.

The gap between values and knowledge

Most people, when asked, want their money to do more than grow. The FCA's 2024 Financial Lives Survey found that 72% of UK adults agreed with the statement “I would like the way my money is invested to do some good as well as provide me with a financial return”, with 65% specifically wanting to invest in a way that protects the environment. That is not a niche position. That is a clear majority.

And yet the gap between that preference and what people's money is actually doing remains significant. Government research into green pensions found that green fund options were often not clearly labelled, difficult to find, and that using search terms like “environment”, “green” or “ESG” in pension provider portals returned no results at all.

So we have people who want their investments to reflect their values, and a system that makes it genuinely difficult to act on that preference. The issue isn't consumer apathy. It's a design problem — and in some cases, a transparency problem.

Why asking customers what they care about matters

The Rewired Earth collaboration was grounded in a belief I still hold: that good strategy starts with genuinely understanding the people you serve, not with assumptions about what they probably want.

This sounds obvious. It isn't always how things work in practice.

Financial services organisations hold enormous amounts of capital. The investment decisions made with that capital have real-world consequences — on climate, on communities, on the things the UN SDGs exist to address. The seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by all UN member states in 2015, represent a shared commitment to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all by 2030. They are interconnected, and so are the investment flows that help or hinder progress toward them.

When we asked consumers which goals mattered most to them, we were doing something useful on two levels. We were gathering insight that could shape how the organisation invested and communicated. And we were raising awareness — helping people make the connection between their pension pot and the world they wanted to live in.

That second piece gets underestimated. Awareness comes before action. You cannot act on a preference you don't know you have.

The greenwashing problem in the middle

It would be wrong to write about sustainable finance without acknowledging the thing that has complicated the whole conversation in recent years: the trust problem.

EY's 2024 Global Institutional Investor Survey found that 88% of institutional investors had increased their use of ESG information, but 66% said their institution was likely to decrease its consideration of ESG in decision-making — in part due to concerns that ESG-related initiatives harm short-term performance. The tension between what institutions say and what they actually do has been a recurring theme.

For consumers, the effect of greenwashing — genuine or perceived — is corrosive. Government research found that concerns about greenwashing were a significant barrier to consumers engaging with green pension options. People who wanted to invest more sustainably were holding back because they didn't trust that sustainable funds were actually what they claimed to be.

This is a solvable problem. But solving it requires honesty about what investments are doing, clear and consistent labelling, and a willingness to tell customers the truth even when it's complicated. Asking people what they care about is a first step. Showing them how their money reflects — or doesn't reflect — those values is what follows.

What the SDGs offer financial services

The SDGs are sometimes talked about in financial services as a reporting framework, a way of mapping existing activity onto a set of global goals and showing what proportion of your portfolio is “aligned”. That can be useful. It can also be a bit convenient.

What I find more interesting is using them as a genuine strategic lens. Not “which of our existing investments can we map to SDG 13?” but “what do the people we serve actually care about, and how does our capital allocation reflect that?”

FTSE Russell's 2025 Annual Sustainable Investment Survey found that 73% of asset owners are currently applying sustainability considerations to their investments, with financial performance and risk management now the top drivers — ahead of societal good. That shift is worth paying attention to. Sustainable investment is moving from a values-led niche to a mainstream risk and return consideration. The organisations that built genuine understanding of consumer values earlier will be better positioned as that shift continues.

What I think that quiz was really doing

Looking back at it now, the Rewired Earth collaboration was about something more than market research. It was an attempt to make a connection visible — between an individual's values, their financial decisions, and the state of the world.

Most people move through their financial lives without ever being asked what kind of world they want their money to help build. They're asked about risk appetite, time horizons, and tax efficiency. Rarely about values.

The quiz was a small way of changing that. Of saying: you have preferences that go beyond return. You have views on poverty and climate and inequality. And those views are relevant to how your money is invested.

That connection between personal values and financial decisions is something the industry is still learning to make well. The consumer interest is clearly there. Some 80% of people in a UK government survey said they were concerned about climate change. The infrastructure to translate that concern into meaningful investment choice is still catching up.

That's a gap worth closing. And it starts with asking people what they actually care about.