Socially responsible finance – a fast-expanding market

International audienceSociety is increasingly sensitive to the principles of corporate social responsibility, a fact that has been thoroughly taken on board by equity asset managers, who have addressed this need by proposing SRI or Socially Responsible Investment products. SRI has witnessed a rapid surge in interest over the last few years: many financial institutions have secured a positioning in this market by backing growth in volume and stabilisation in methodological content. In this paper, on the one hand we study the development of asset volumes involved in socially responsible financing and, on the other, we discuss the methodological difficulties that the new finance niche will be required to tackle successfully over the next few years