Investors and regulators are increasingly screening organisations on environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, not just financial return - and finance managers who cannot translate ESG data into investment decisions risk losing access to capital and credibility with stakeholders. This training course from the Arab British Fellowship Training Academy is built around that practical pressure: it equips finance professionals to identify sustainable opportunities, price ESG-related risk, and build portfolios that stand up to scrutiny from both regulators and socially conscious investors.

Rather than treating sustainability as a separate compliance topic, the programme connects it directly to core finance skills - valuation, portfolio construction, and performance analysis - so participants can defend sustainable investment decisions in the same financial language used for any other decision. By the end, finance managers are positioned to lead their organisation's sustainability agenda, strengthen long-term risk management, and build a reputation for responsible stewardship of capital.

Who Should Attend?

• Finance and budget managers
• Financial reporting and strategy team members
• Risk management professionals
• Commercial managers and capital investment/project team members

What You Will Be Able to Do

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Explain what sustainable investment means in practice and identify emerging financial opportunities it creates
• Evaluate the performance of sustainable companies and build portfolios that mix sustainable and conventional holdings
• Estimate how climate-related risk is likely to affect financial performance

The course gives finance managers a complete toolkit for embedding ESG considerations into financial decision-making, aligning portfolios with global sustainability standards, and meeting tightening regulatory requirements. It also strengthens their ability to appeal to socially responsible investors while protecting long-term value creation, preparing them to lead sustainability initiatives, manage related risk, and sharpen their organisation's competitive edge in a changing financial landscape.

Module 1: The Financial Case for Sustainable Companies

• The concept of sustainable investment and the agency problem in corporate decision-making
• Reading the financial statements of sustainable companies
• Value creation from the perspective of management, owners and lenders
• A system of interrelated ratios and integrated financial performance analysis
• Economic value added and bankruptcy risk in sustainable businesses

Module 2: Building and Allocating a Sustainable Portfolio

• Investment opportunities and the required rate of return
• Sustainable investment strategies, risk and return trade-offs
• Portfolio theory and capital market theory
• Asset pricing models applied to sustainable and conventional assets

Module 3: Data-Driven Tools for Sustainable Investment Decisions

• Simple regression analysis and maximum likelihood estimation
• Polynomial curve fits and describing data using equations
• Using regression to predict performance in sustainable vs non-sustainable companies
• Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) as a tool for comparing outcomes