Years working in international development showed Tony Burdon, head of Make My Money Matter, that sustainable pensions can harness trillions of pounds to build a better world – at a scale governments and charities can’t. He talks to Travis Elsum
Tony Burdon’s career has long been driven by his desire to make a positive impact. This has been the north star that has guided him across the world, from poor villages to disaster zones and back to the UK, each role building on the last. As CEO of Make My Money Matter, he steers a successful campaign that engages and empowers UK pension scheme members to demand positive change for a better future.
Burdon got his start with development charity Voluntary Service Overseas. Fresh out of university, civil engineering degree in hand, he was sent to Malawi to work on projects bringing water to villages. Seeing the impact of running water on the villagers’ lives was formative. “That was it – I could use my skills to help people,” he explains. “I decided I was going to work in international development for the rest of my life.”
On returning from Malawi, he joined Oxfam as a humanitarian engineer, working to establish water infrastructure and sanitation in refugee camps and war zones from Angola to Rwanda, Somalia to Iraq. He enjoyed the work, but found it relentless: “You go from one disaster to another, one emergency to another, unable to tackle causes.”
Facing burnout, Burdon undertook a master’s degree in development studies before returning to Oxfam to manage overseas programmes. He then moved to policy work and represented Oxfam on the board of Jubilee 2000, a campaign that drove the cancellation of more than US$100bn of debt owed by 35 of the world’s poorest countries. Seeing the power of finance to achieve “impact at scale” was another watershed moment.
His next move was to the Treasury, where he joined a team advising the then-chancellor Gordon Brown on international development. He worked there for five years, with highlights including working with Sir Nicholas Stern on the prime minister’s Commission for Africa. He then tried a core Treasury job in taxation, but did not find the work motivating and ended up moving to the now-defunct Department for International Development (DFID), working in Nepal and Nigeria, as well as in London.
It was while he was leading DFID’s private sector department, grappling with the challenge of mobilising investment into developing countries, that Burdon started talking to screenwriter and director Richard Curtis about “a campaign to let investment ‘make poverty history’”. Curtis and former government special adviser Jo Corlett developed these ideas, consulting widely, including with industry, to co-found Make My Money Matter (MMMM). Burdon later joined as CEO and launched the campaign in 2020.
Voice and choice
MMMM aims to “give people more voice and choice around how their money is invested”, Burdon explains. An influence on the campaign was a TED talk by Dr Bronwyn King, an oncologist who saw the impacts of the tobacco industry first-hand while working on a lung cancer ward. After meeting her pensions representative, she was horrified to discover that her pension was invested in tobacco companies.
UK pension scheme members collectively have £3trn of savings but many people are not engaged with their pensions. Burdon believes this lack of engagement is a key driver of the misalignment between people’s values and their investments, as in King’s case. “People know they are not saving enough, they’re scared, and when they’re scared, they freeze,” he says. He thinks a lot of people avoid looking at their pension, but this only leads to worse outcomes.
A good way to increase engagement, he argues, is “to help pension members understand what impact their investments have on the world around them, and then try to align that in a way that meets with their values.” The climate emergency is one area over which pension scheme members have deep concerns, and they are often shocked to realise that the money in their pension has contributed to the problem.
MMMM’s impressive level of success during its three years of existence shows that it is possible to engage people with their pensions, and the financial services industry would do well to learn from it. Brand recognition has reached 42%, and is even higher among the under-30s, at 60%. This has been helped by witty and shareable social media messaging and videos.
One such message is the ‘21x challenge’: the idea that greening your pension is 21 times more effective at cutting carbon than other lifestyle tweaks, such as stopping flying and going vegetarian. This figure is based on analysis supported by Aviva and sustainability consultancy Route2, Burdon explains: they compared a conventional global investment fund’s emissions with those of a sustainable fund for a £30,000 pension pot, and then compared that difference with the emissions savings associated with lifestyle choices.
He acknowledges that the analysis has limitations but explains that it is primarily designed to get people thinking about the impact of their savings. “No one talks about pensions, and it is your second biggest financial asset after your house, if you’re lucky enough to own one.”
Investing in the future
MMMM has conducted surveys to better understand what is important to pension savers. The general message is clear and simple: “They want their money to be doing the right things, and are shocked when they find out it isn’t,” says Burdon.
According to surveys carried out by MMMM, 60%–70% of pension scheme members want their pension to be invested in sustainability. Deforestation and climate change are the top two issues but they are also concerned about gender equality, diversity and workforce conditions.
Burdon argues that aligning with pension scheme members’ values is not a trade-off but a prudent approach to optimising risk-adjusted long-term returns, considering the commitments and momentum behind a sustainable transition. He points out that more than 50 leading schemes in the UK – totalling some £1.5trn in assets – have committed to net zero. “Where do you want to be?” he asks. “Do you want to invest in the companies of the future or the dinosaur industries of the past? If we know that all companies will eventually align with net zero, that’s where you need to be heading.”
Pressing fund managers
Once people are aware of their pension’s impact, MMMM helps them understand how to use it to drive positive change. It has focused on getting default funds to align with net zero. “We’re saying to people, demand that your fund changes,” says Burdon.
To this end, MMMM has email templates on its website for people who want to contact their pension fund. If their fund has not made a net-zero commitment, pension scheme members are encouraged to pressure it to do so. If it has, MMMM encourages members to hold it to account by asking for further details, including short-term emissions reduction targets, better stewardship and plans for eliminating deforestation.
MMMM is planning to release a consumer-facing report this year that will rank how well funds are performing on climate change and deforestation. It will consider emissions targets, deforestation policies, proxy voting records, changes in portfolio emissions intensity and stewardship, among other criteria. Burdon believes the report will provide “the sort of information consumers should have. And then I think people – as well as employers – can start to make more informed pension choices.”
He acknowledges that it will take time to get the balance right in providing accessible and beneficial sustainability information to pension investors. He points to progress on reporting initiatives, such as the Taskforce on Climate-Related Finance Disclosures and the International Sustainability Standards Board, and believes we will eventually see “impact information, such as climate disclosures or workforce conditions, routinely coming from companies as part of their financial reporting”.
Actuaries must act
Burdon mentions that a fellow MMMM board member has a T-shirt that says ‘accountants will save the world’, and wonders if it should say ‘actuaries’. He recognises the profession’s sustainability commitments and work in this space, and acknowledges that actuaries have “a deep understanding of risk and the management of it”. The profession could be more vigorous in clarifying what the risks are to finance and to people and planet, he notes, and needs to play a leadership role in moving financial institutions forward.
He reflects on his time as a humanitarian engineer, thrown into disaster situations where everyone would work relentlessly to save lives. With the impacts of climate change set to become more pervasive, frequent and severe, he asks actuaries and the finance sector as a whole to treat their work on sustainability risks and managing the net-zero transition with the same urgency and effort. “What’s the use of retiring in a world on fire?”
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