Scotland is missing an opportunity to become a leader in the rapidly growing field of ethical investment due to an unprepared workforce and a lack of clarity around regulation.

SRI is an investing strategy that aims to generate positive social change, while excluding investments that are seen to be harmful to the planet, or that have a negative impact on society.

It’s an area of financial services that has grown exponentially in recent years, with the number of job listings for ESG (environmental social governance) analysts in Scotland increasing by 70% over the last two years – reflective of soaring global demand for ethically-driven investment.

ESG and SRI have gone from being fringe topics to front and centre in everyday life. Nearly every big business has an ESG strategy and the major investment firms are advertising SRI portfolios across mainstream media.

Yet there is a shortage of candidates coming through to meet the demand for ESG-related roles. We need academic institutions in Scotland to catch up with trends. Those in and around the sector must be encouraged to up-skill.

Regulation around SRI has struggled to keep pace with the growth of the industry. FCA-regulated asset managers, including life insurers and pension providers, have been required since 1 January to disclose how they take climate-related issues into account when managing investments. They also need to disclose how they will meet the recommendations of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures Act and publish disclosures on the climate-related attributes of their products.

Despite this, attempts to better define SRI has faltered, with the delays in the last two years to introducing the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) which aims to make the sustainability profile of funds more comparable and better understood by end-investors.

The Scottish Government could play a more active role in helping to frame definitions and standards specifically for those working Scotland.

Such a framework would not need to carry legal force but could be a set of principles that investors sign up to and uphold. Institutional investors and individual investors need help to separate the wheat from the chaff and this could help them in making more informed decisions.

One of the biggest issues we have is how business is defining ESG - or what ethical investing actually means. It can have so many flavours or takes. This opaqueness – without doubt – opens the door to greenwashing.

A lot of asset managers would be quite frightened of providing greater disclosure – they might be talking an ESG game but in practice when you look at what they are doing in their own organisation they are not walking the walk.