1pm - 1:45pm
Wednesday 29 April 2026
Institute Seminar Series: Sustainable investing in a changing environment: private investor strategies
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey
GU2 7XH
Event details
Abstract
While institutional investors dominate the academic literature on sustainable investing, private investors – whose global assets total $42 trillion – remain relatively underexplored.
We investigate how private investors practice sustainable investing, how they respond to sustainability-related regulation, and how recent global events have shaped their investment behaviour.
Based on a survey of 13,396 Finnish private investors, we find that ethical and sustainable investors actively employ investment strategies such as ESG integration, positive and negative screening, and thematic investing. We find that investor awareness of the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) is limited, and its influence on investment decisions remains modest.
Furthermore, while COVID-19 had little impact, the war in Ukraine increased investment activity among sustainable investors, and the cryptocurrency crisis led to reduced investment activity. These findings offer novel insights into the behaviour and motivations of private investors in sustainable finance.
Speaker
Professor Bonnie Buchanan
Associate Dean (International) - FABSS; REF Lead (UoA17); Director of Sustainable and Explainable FinTech (SAEF) Center, Immediate Past Head of Department of Finance and Accounting and Professor of Finance
Biography
Professor Bonnie Buchanan is the Associate Dean (International) in the Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences.
She is also the REF Lead (UoA 17). Professor Buchanan is also the Director of the Sustainable and Explainable FinTech (SAEF) Center at the Surrey Business School (SBS) and a Professor of Finance.
Professor Buchanan is also the Co-Editor of International Journal of Finance and Economics (an ABS 3 journal). Professor Buchanan also serves on the AI Consortium, established by the Bank of England and UK FCA.
She is the Immediate Past Head of the Department of Finance and Accounting at SBS (2019 - 2023). Professor Buchanan is also a fellow of the University's Center of Sustainability, the Center for AI and the Centre of Digital Economy (CoDE).
In 2018-2019, Professor Buchanan served as the USA Fulbright-Hanken Distinguished Chair of Business and Economics at the Hanken School of Economics, Finland. Prior to this, Professor Buchanan worked at Seattle University where she was the Howard Bosanko Professor in International Finance and Economics and the George Albers Professor. She also served as the MSF program director and MBA program director at Seattle University.
Professor Buchanan has published in leading international journals including the Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Business Ethics, American Business Law Journal, Journal of International Financial Markets and Institutions, International Review of Financial Analysis, Oxford Review of Economic Policy and European Journal of Finance. Her research on shareholder proposals has been recognized with the Hoeber Memorial Award for Outstanding Article in American Business Law Journal and her work has been cited in the Financial Times. She has research expertise in FinTech, AI in financial services, securitization, CSR and law and finance. Professor Buchanan has also taught in Australia, Russia and Finland. She was the Editor in Chief of Journal of Risk Finance between 2013-2021.
Professor Buchanan also appears in the media on FinTech, big data and AI issues.
Contact us
Email ifs@surrey.ac.uk for the MS Teams link and with any questions.
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