Mindful Money moves into Australia, as founder Barry Coates steps

This article originally featured on Business Desk in October 2026, written by Greg Hurrell.

The phrasing may be tongue-in-cheek, but the ambition is real. Mindful Money’s website digs inside investment and KiwiSaver fund portfolios. It flags companies of concern based on criteria such as human rights, environmental harm and fossil fuels.

That is the core of its ethos to promote ethical investing, and it may be the only organisation in the world providing such paywall-free information. Last week Mindful Money released its impact report for the 12 months ending March 31, 2026. It showed its website had more than 298,000 unique visitors.

This year Mindful Money has made tentative steps into the giant Australian funds sector and is looking at other countries beyond.

Coates is taking a back seat after being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer of the bowel and liver. He said the initial prognosis wasn’t good but the targeted treatments now available were more effective.

“It looks like I am going to have a bit more time and even a remote possibility of being able to get rid of it, so it’s worth fighting for.”

The perils of assumptions

In a parallel universe, Coates might have been an oil company executive, or the CEO of a large listed corporate. It’s likely his early life and career helped steer him in a different direction.

“I was brought up in Auckland, and I guess an early influence was my father. He was a lawyer and really cared about his clients, cared about the law, and hated it becoming commercial and losing touch… that it was there to serve people.”

With a degree in commerce with economics and accounting, the young Coates spent three years working in Samoa. It gave him an appreciation of working in a bounded economy.

He also realised many of the assumptions made in wealthy nations weren’t appropriate for developing countries.

“Often the aid industry or business goes into the developing world and, for example, assumes that markets work. And they just don’t in many cases.”

In many countries, there was a coterie of wealthy people in the capital and the rest of the population lived in poverty.

“There are a whole lot of things that people make mistakes about because they just don’t understand the fundamentals of the societies that they’re working in.”

Climbing the corporate ladder

Returning to NZ, Coates decided he needed some corporate experience and more education. He worked for Shell, BP and the Todd Corporation, and managed the Māui and Kapuni oil and gas fields, all while studying alternative energy at Massey University.

He was fast-tracking the corporate ladder but said he struggled to make sense of the whole idea, and so in 1984 he headed off for a master’s degree at the Yale School of Management. Some of the top people from finance gave talks including Ivan Boesky, an inspiration for Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko.

“I remember asking him a question: do you really believe in this stuff about Chinese walls between you and the trading arm of your investment bank?”

Within months Boesky was convicted and later jailed for an insider trading scandal.

Coates’ studies were followed by international development work based in the UK, with a priority on helping give developing countries a voice in trade negotiations.

He spent the next 10 and a half years as head of Oxfam NZ, where he reorientated the organisation from an aid agency to working more closely with developing countries.

“I took the opportunity to focus a lot of Oxfam’s work on the poorer parts of the Pacific, and that was really hard stuff for me.”

A short career in politics

In 2014, Coates stood unsuccessfully as a Green Party candidate, but in 2016 was surprised to be called in as a list MP. It was a short career that ended in losing his seat in 2017.

“The Greens had a disastrous election, just completely disastrous.”

The disaster came courtesy of Labour leader Jacinda Ardern, someone Coates much admires. Her declaration that climate change was her “nuclear moment” sucked the oxygen out of the Greens, and Coates was out.

“The best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.

Mindful Money

Mindful Money was launched in 2019 with a bunch of volunteers and “bootstrapped to a charity out of nowhere”, as Coates put it.

It had a mission to show KiwiSaver customers and retail investors what was really in their portfolio. Several surveys showed there was a real lack of transparency.

“People… had no real, tangible information about what ethical investment really meant, aside from rather vague statements from providers.”

At first the managed funds sector didn’t take well to Mindful Money, almost seeing its approach as heresy, Coates said.

“How can you tell people that information about us? We have kids coming up to us and asking, ‘Daddy, why are you invested in those awful companies?’”

That pushback didn’t last because Mindful Money was open about its methodology and responded to any questions about it.

“Within a few years, we had gained the credibility, but not necessarily the support, of the mainstream and larger players.”

Some of the niche players gravitated towards Mindful Money such as Booster and Generate, and then Pathfinder and Simplicity came along.

Nuclear weapons and the Palestinian question

An early win was in nuclear weapons divestment. Coates said more than 100 funds and about $100 million in KiwiSaver funds were invested in the sector.

“We did lobbying back to the funds, we told the public about it and that dropped to the current level of about $15m. Most of those are in index funds so they’re much harder to get rid of,” he said.

“The most common response is, ‘WTF? I had no idea that my fund was invested in these companies, I thought I was told that I was invested ethically’.”

By 2021 a number of fund managers were grumbling that the charity only accentuated the negative and ignored the positive impact of investments.

Four years on, Mindful Money is set to launch a positive outcome investments feature on its website this month.

Mindful Money has also lobbied against investing in companies supporting Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories. Coates said he had plenty of Jewish friends who took the line that the land was Israel’s God-given right.

Mindful Money took its guidance from international law and agreements, and the International Court of Justice’s 2024 ruling that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories was illegal.

“We do take a position, and we feel like we have to because human rights is one of the things that we care deeply about, but we try and do it in a way that isn’t about whether we’re pro-Israel or anti-Israel or anything else.”

Working towards world domination

The forthcoming positive outcomes feature is one of two major projects Mindful Money has been working on for several years. The other is taking over the planet, sort of.

NZ is a small pond, and Mindful Money has its sights set on Australia. With its A$4.4 trillion (NZ$5.5t) in assets, the country has the world’s fourth largest pool of retirement funds.

The charity has been laying the groundwork to operate in Australia and in June this year launched a pilot, Mindful Investing, which covers 15 of the largest superannuation funds that together manage more than A$2.1t.

“We just now need to figure out how to scale up fast enough in a very big country that requires a lot of capital to scale up.

“It’s going to be an exciting time for Mindful Money and if we do that in Australia there’s no reason why we can’t do it in other countries. There’s nowhere you can get that portfolio transparency for free, and so we’re in a process of world domination.”

Myth busting

Looking back on his time with Mindful Money, Coates said three myths needed challenging.

Myth number one was that the public only cared about returns, not ethical investing.

“A lot of people do still give the primacy to financial returns, but they also want to know that their money is invested ethically. The realisation has now come is that there is no trade-off there.”

The second myth was that fund manager engagement through stewardship would have a positive effect on companies.

“I think that has been allowed to be sloppy thinking for so long, because in a few cases that’s absolutely true.”

In reality, many companies, including oil giants, had made clear they wouldn’t be swayed by investors into doing anything they didn’t really want to do.

Myth number three was that divestment didn’t work because there were always other investors to step in. It’s an argument Coates “profoundly” disagrees with and he said Mindful Money would soon be publishing research to prove the point.

“If it’s something like fossil fuels and US$40t [NZ$71.3t] is divested from fossil fuels, does that make a difference? Of course it does. It’s just at what scale you’re working at, and we’ve seen it in tobacco, and we’ve seen it in in fossil fuels, we saw it with anti-apartheid.”

Confusing times

Coates said it was a very confused time for ethical investors.

“You look at the US and of course money’s flowing out of ESG funds, but why wouldn’t it? Trump is saying, ‘anyone who says ESG, you’re the spawn of the devil and Republican states will not invest with you’.

“I personally think ESG as a terminology has passed its sell-by date, but we will see new forms of this because members of the public want to see their money invested in ways which they’re happy with.”

Coates said many fund managers had come around to see Mindful Money as changing the industry for the better.

“I remember talking to one of the asset managers, BlackRock, and said, ‘I suppose you know a bit about Mindful Money, but you probably never hear about us’.”

“The guy said, ‘I never walk into a meeting with a New Zealand investment fund without them talking about Mindful Money’.”