Lately, I've been trying to reconcile my new-found interest in working in financial services. In college, it had never crossed my mind, but now, a financial services firm, State Street, has become my top choice for the next step. In fact, just to participate in State Street's final round interview, I gave up an offer at a marketing consulting firm. Some of you guys might find my new path funny or strange because you probably never thought I'd go into finance. Truth be told, when interviewing for a financial services firm and one of my interviewers asked me "what do your friends think you'd be doing after college", my immediate answer was, "well, not financial services...*nervous chuckle*". I'm not sure if that was the best answer...but anyhow.
So why now? And what about sustainability?
After much thinking, I've actually reconciled the whole bit quite well. I went into Environmental Studies to be a productive problem solver. However, in the summer of 2010 (when I was in Turkey working for a semi-governmental environmental consulting firm), I had the realization that while I had great motivation to tackle sustainable development projects, the usual end-points for environmentalists were non-profits, think tanks, and government jobs, which didn't come across to me as being all that effective. Yes, people were motivated in bringing about a greater good, but their influence was weak. To realize a true difference, they relied on persuading someone else to make a change and could not be direct drivers of change themselves. Corporations (and also wall street) on the other hands have enormous influences. If I want to be a productive problem solver, I can't be stuck at a place that doesn't get things done and I can't work at a place that doesn't try to solve the problems I want to solve either.
I then sought to combine my interest in sustainability (the answer to a problem) with business (an effective vehicle to deliver the solution). On this track, I started working at the Yale Office of Sustainability to calculate the financial returns on their investments in sustainability. I was also thinking along these lines when I decided to start building my own social enterprise, Sprout, with Ray and Mike. A social enterprise that addressed environmental and social issues was the perfect vehicle for me to both tackle the problems I wanted to solve while being effective.
Now that Sprout is a thing of the past, I've arrived at a new crossroad...and I'm quite excited about the direction it might take me! Regardless of whether or not I will work in financial services in the upcoming year (aka, whether or not State Street will hire me), the whole job search process has allowed me to brainstorm many options that I haven't realized existed before.
The new idea is: what about sustainability and finance?
Sustainability is becoming more and more connected with the role of the CFO. In hard economic times, investments in energy efficiency and other cost-cutting "green" projects have found a niche with CFOs who can claim to doubly reap the benefits of cost-savings and better corporate image. Lately, CFOs have also begun to make sustainability a strategic investment in ways beyond cost-cutting. I am not aiming for one of those CFO jobs, but I think there is a potential niche in the future for those who can occupy the dual realm of sustainability and finance. One potential opportunity is sustainability related investing (like what I did at the Yale Office of Sustainability). Investments are still made on the basis of profitability, however, the only projects considered are limited to ones that are considered socially-good. Just today, I've received the offer to do first round interviews from one such impact investing firm, New Island Capital--and I'm pretty psyched! Maybe they'll hire me. :) There are also more traditional investment possibilities such as forest resources, other natural resources, energy, transportation, etc. A skill set in finance becomes a vehicle through which I can serve the purpose of sustainability.
Instead of thinking of finance as a bad thing (an opinion that was no doubt influenced by my days of working for a mortgage consultant in the summer of 2008--the height of the US housing bubble burst--and the collapse of the world's economic system in my first few days of college), I've come to understand finance as the allocation of capital where it is needed. The people who work in this industry are like firefighters, but instead of delivering water, they deliver money, and instead of fighting a natural disaster, this disaster is usually man-made.
Finance isn't a bad thing in of itself, it just has a poor reputation in the US because it is poorly regulated and have all the wrong incentives in place. Give any industry the wrong incentives that encourages corruption and a lack of accountability, and they'll surely become "bad" too. For example, if doctors could receive generous paychecks from from pharmaceutics companies in the form of prescription "commission" and suffer no consequences if a patient found the drug to be ill-prescribed, the bad incentives and lack of accountability would also make the medical profession "bad", even though the inherent services of a doctor--that of treating patients for a disease--is good. I'm sure this is happening in some form in the US, but it's especially acute in China, which is why I never want to go to a Chinese hospital. ever.
So this is my inspired rant after watching the documentary "Inside Job", which was really well made (and also narrated by Matt Damon!). It's a much harsher, convincing, and entertaining condemnation of the current financial system/the players involved than the other documentaries I've watched on the topic (such as "The Meltdown" and "The Flaw"). Of the three, I'd definitely recommend "Insider's Job" which was more informative and had interviews with some of the important characters. You also finish the film really wishing someone would eff up Goldman Sachs who seems to have made money off selling risky stocks to pension funds and then profited when it came to light that the loans were bad because Goldman Sachs got themselves insured. You also kinda hate the fact that all the CEOs/big fishes got to keep their big bonus checks even though their companies went bankrupt (no accountability, sigh).
I am glad to report that State Street, the financial services firm that I want to work for, has remained relatively clean in this industry.
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