Speaking sustainably: A conversation with Amanda Davidson

Elizabeth Haigh
Investment Director and founder of Greenbank

I was delighted to meet up with Amanda for coffee at the Royal Academy in London shortly before she was due to give a violin concert for friends in France.

In 2022, Amanda stepped down from her final board position at Saunderson House, the financial services company, shortly after it became part of the Rathbones Group. However, we had first met 30 years earlier in 1992 when Amanda was a partner at Holden Meehan, the IFA firm that played a key role in raising awareness of ethical investment among retail investors. 

At that time, ethical investment was still in its early stages with only a handful of ethically screened unit trusts available to investors with ethical concerns. Holden Meehan’s free ‘Independent guide to ethical and green investment funds’ was one of the main sources of information about this new style of investing and was widely covered in the financial press, which loved the clarity of the guide’s rating table with its trees denoting positive criteria and cannons, negative ones. 

Holden Meehan soon realised that there was a growing demand from investors wanting to set their own criteria, rather than relying on those defined by the ethical funds. Founding partner Pat Meehan approached me to create an ethical investment portfolio service for individual clients who wanted to invest directly in the stock market. 

This approach attracted a steady stream of clients, and over the next few years, Amanda and I worked together with a number of engaged private investors. 

We recalled how important it was to ensure that investors understood the implications of their ethical restrictions and did not inadvertently narrow their investment choices. I asked her what the main concerns of her investors were in those early days: arms, animal welfare and companies harming the environment were top of the list. 

To ensure we could screen companies effectively, I worked initially with Peter Webster at EIRIS, the ethical investment research service, before going on to undertake my own ethical and sustainable research at Rathbones and establishing our in-house research team. One of our first engagement projects was our ground-breaking Family Friendly Employment research, which Amanda appreciated as the majority of her ethical investors at the time were female.

It was difficult for investors at that time to access financial advice that incorporated their ethical concerns. Amanda and her colleagues did not impose their own views but ensured that the option to select ethical investment was clearly visible on their suitability ‘Fact Find’.

Amanda’s career in financial services began in 1977 after graduating with a degree in maths and physics. Well before the days of the internet, she answered a job advert placed on a newsagent’s noticeboard. She worked for an adviser on Moorgate before going on to become a founding director of Chase de Vere a few years later. 

In the early 1980s, the financial sector was largely self-regulating, and Amanda witnessed the resulting harm to private investors who were entrusting their life savings to unscrupulous advisers.

These injustices inspired her career-long passion for consumer protection and would lead to her appointment by the UK Treasury to the board of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in 2010 and subsequently the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). This was undoubtedly the highlight of Amanda’s career and she still remembers the beautiful turquoise ink on her letter of appointment, approved by the then chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne. 

Amanda has been a champion of gender balance and diversity and worked to improve language, attitudes and accessibility while at the FCA. She feels strongly that the diversity of a company’s board is not “nice to have but essential” to financial success. (She was pleased to hear about the impressive gender balance we have at Greenbank.) Amanda’s family was closely involved in the Unitarian movement and she has continued to support her old school, Channing in Highgate, as both a governor and sponsor of the scholars’ programme that benefited her own mother and aunt after the second world war.

She is delighted by the continued success of her former colleagues at Saunderson House, whose integration into the Rathbones Group has been greatly helped by my fellow Greenbank investment director Corinne Bathgate, who leads their sustainable investment proposition.

I asked her if she had any career regrets. 

“Absolutely not!”  

“I have learned from every experience.” 

She then added: 

“The only thing you should regret is what you have not had time to do.”

And how would she advise today’s investors? 

“Ask questions and probe to ensure you know what you are getting. There is no such thing as a stupid question!”