Implementation of the EU Reforms on Retail Investing for the Green Transition

Background

The EU Sustainable Finance Action Plan provides the increasing flow of retail savings towards financing the transition to a carbon-neutral economy and improving investor protection. Since 2022, new EU financial and insurance directives have required all financial product distributors to assess their customers’ sustainability preferences. However, Bulgaria, Estonia and Romania are lagging behind in implementing these directives: There is a significant gap between retail investors’ demand for environmental financial products and their supply and distribution, which particularly affects impact-oriented investors. Financial advisors are not sufficiently trained, and products are often marketed in a misleading way.

Project

The project supports the implementation of the EU Sustainable Finance Action Plan in Bulgaria, Estonia and Romania, with a focus on supervision, product marketing and distribution and the flow of retail investor savings to finance the transition to a carbon-neutral economy.

The 2° Investing Initiative (2DII), an independent, non-profit think tank implementing this project, transfers its outputs developed over the past three years to Bulgaria, Estonia, and Romania. Project partners, including the Association of Bulgarian Investor Relations, the Institute of Baltic Studies, the Institute of Financial Studies in Romania and the Association of Romanian Financial Services Users, implement pilot-tested methodologies for consumer research, mystery shopping and visits, environmental product analyses and industry guidelines. The project builds on www.myfairmoney.eu, a European information platform on sustainable finance for private investors and a new greenwashing knowledge hub. These platforms are replicated in the target countries as learning hubs on sustainable finance and greenwashing. 

The implementing partners are supported in adopting and deploying research materials on the following topics:

• Retail investor sustainability preferences (resulting in new methodologies, data and reports)
• Offering and distributing financial products (resulting in new methodologies, data and reports)
• Capacity-building for supervisors, product managers and distributors (resulting in seminars, training schemes and an advisor certification programme on impact finance)
• Tool development on sustainable finance for retail investors and local stakeholders (resulting in local MyFairMoney websites and a new greenwashing information platform)

Results are disseminated and the project builds the capacities of local authorities, consumers, market participants and universities to integrate the findings into their work and create long-term impacts. Finally, the project monitors the implementation of the EU directives and helps to realise unexploited market potential for green financial products in the three target countries.

Last update: May 2024