Our CEO, Abi, reflects on 2022, her ambitions for The Big Exchange, and what's in store for the year to come.
It’s that time of year when we look back over 2022 to see what went well, celebrate successes, and reflect on what we’ve achieved, and we also want to look ahead in 2023 to see what we are going to focus on next year. Our CEO, Abi has written a short blog to give you her view on how the past will help us move to the future.
It has been quite a bumper year and despite markets being challenging we have achieved a lot with your ongoing support. We have:
I want to thank our customers who completed the survey in the summer: some of your feedback has been easier to implement and you’ll have seen changes. Other bits of your feedback have longer-term plans and I want to assure you that we are working on it, and will we keep you updated on our progress.
There have been changes in the firm and we said farewell to our previous-CEO Jill and I was delighted to re-join The Big Exchange as the new CEO earlier this year. We also welcomed new faces to the team – including welcoming Bev Shah to our Board – and got back into working together in an office following our period of working remotely after the pandemic.
While there have been many positives, it is a challenging time at the moment: war in Ukraine, a cost-of-living crisis, increasing interest rates, high inflation, and taxes taking chunks from our income, but there is still a huge amount that can be done to help people, to educate, and to set up the right behaviours, all while making sure that we are continuing to think about the long term health of our planet and of our communities.
There are four main areas in which I want The Big Exchange to excel going forwards:
It is important to look back. When I invested for the first time, it took me a long time to feel comfortable and confident enough to press “Invest Now”. I was scared about making a mistake, doing something wrong, or investing in something that I would regret. I worried that I did not know enough.
For me, if The Big Exchange can help people feel empowered and confident when clicking “Invest Now” we will be succeeding. We aim to do this through providing the right information in the right language to help you make informed choices when deciding on investing in your future, people’s, and our planet’s.
I want to make The Big Exchange the most transparent place to invest in funds. You deserve to know what companies are owned through your investment in the funds you choose and what those companies are doing. It is simply not good enough for investment managers to say “our fund is doing good for the planet”. Funds must show how the assets they own are making a difference and prove to you what they’ve actually done.
We believe in providing you with as much factual and relevant information in as understandable a way as we possibly can, so that you can make an informed decision yourself.
If you type ‘investor’ into a search engine, you’ll more often than not get a stereotypical view of what an investor looks like. It is often said that you need to be rich to invest and that you need to have money to lose if you want to make a positive difference. That is just not the case, and we want to change the narrative. None of us aim to have money to lose, but we do want the investments we work so hard to gather, small or large, to grow AND to make a positive impact on the planet.
We can help you by obsessing about doing more for less. We rate all our investments against our impact methodology and we aim to not charge you any more than our competitors. We are about doing the right thing and offering value-for-money. We are about finding other ways to reward our customers for helping to make The Big Exchange a leader in accessible investing which provides investors good value with good ethics.
We need to invest wisely to make the world a better place. Investing in a future that won’t exist makes no sense – both financially and ethically.
The Big Exchange, aligned to The Big Issue’s work in campaigning to put the futures of young people at the forefront of decision-making, will match this ethos with investing and allow people to invest for themselves, but not to the detriment of future generations
I am enormously grateful for the team, and also for our customers, our partners, and our whole community who are supporting us on our journey. I hope you all have a good end to the year and here’s to 2023!
Best wishes
Abi Sater
CEO, The Big Exchange
To learn more about how to become a positive impact investor visit The Big Exchange or follow on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter or Facebook or download The Big Exchange App to manage how you save, invest and spend your money, all from one place.
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