A new FCI ecosystem to be developed for Christian investors
- FaithInvest
- Dec 11, 2024
- 2 min read
FaithInvest came away from the recent Mensuram Bonam conference in London, UK, convinced that the event marked a watershed moment for faith-consistent investing in the Catholic Church.
Now the conference organisers have issued a press statement outlining actions and resolutions arising from the two-day summit – and it confirms our belief that the event would have a transformative impact in accelerating faith-consistent investing (FCI), not just in the Catholic Church but across the wider Christian world.
The conference, which brought together 90 financial sector leaders and faith leaders from 16 countries, heard that a key impediment to growing FCI for the estimated $1.75 trillion of Catholic capital is the lack of dedicated investment services for Catholic/ Christian groups.
The relatively few Catholic/Christian-aligned funds are hard to identify on investment-tracking websites such as Morningstar because they are not categorised as such, in contrast to the wide choice of Sharia-compliant funds offered to Muslim investors.
Game changing
That's all set to change with six game-changing actions arising from the Mensuram Bonam summit. They include:
A new Catholic market index is to be developed by Bloomberg Index Services
A new non-profit consortium will be established to guide Catholic investors globally on proxy voting and engagement
A new project will identify Christian investment funds and investigate the
creation of fund sectors for Catholic/Christian investors
Other actions include the publication of a white paper analysing the impact of FCI on long term portfolio performance, and a call for FCI managers and service providers to adopt a consistent reporting framework such as the 'Engage, Enhance, Exclude' framework decribed in Mensuram Bonam.
The London event was the second Mensuram Bonam Faith-Consistent Investment Conference inspired by the 2022 document Mensuram Bonam, published by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which proposes a framework for investing based on Catholic social teaching.
Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, President of the Institute for the Works of Religion (known as the Vatican Bank) who was also one of the authors of Mensuram Bonam, said there were only a handful of funds that meet Catholic ethical criteria out of thousands and thousands of other options. 'Something has to be done,' he said.
He added that last month’s conference was 'like a mini-Synod for the financial sector – from index and data providers to investment advisers, proxy voting specialists and fund performance management organisations – and it has created a way forward for Catholic investors and service providers to further develop a Christian capital ecosystem'.
Estimating the size of Christian finance
The press statement said the latest estimate of $1.75 trillion Christian finance (both in retail and in Catholic institutions) in Europe and the USA alone has been compiled from various sources.
Top level breakdown:
$780bn of Christian finance in Europe
$970bn of Christian capital in US
Read our story about the Menuram Bonam summit.
Read the press statement issued by organisors of the Menuram Bonam summit in full by clicking below.