Impact investing is the next frontier for responsible capitalism

Private investment, public good

“Turn a profit not a blind eye” would be an aspirational tagline for capitalism. Instead, it’s the motto of Abundance, a peer-to-peer investment firm specialising in green projects, ranging from a solar farm in Swindon to a geothermal power plant in Cornwall. Investing in private equity funds that focus on “a better world” – to use Abundance’s phrase – is the driving principle of impact investment.

Project Snowball LLP, jointly founded by two charitable trusts, wants to establish impact investment as a mainstream investment option. Hetan Shah, Chair of Trustees at Friends Provident Foundation – a recent Snowball investor – explains that “Snowball will apply a social and environmental impact lens to all of its investment analysis, reporting and decision making.” The fund, Hetan says, is enabling investment in “microfinance in the developing world, housing for the homeless in the UK, and UK renewable energy projects that are co-operatively owned by the local community.” Without capital investment like Snowball’s, these types of projects wouldn’t exist.

Ethical investing 2.0

It may be harder to measure the additionality delivered by investors in public companies – after an initial public offering, the sale of shares is not creating new funds in the way Abundance or Snowball are. But ethical investment still has a role to play.

EQ Investors, a wealth management firm with B-Corp certification (meaning they meet high social and environmental standards), for example, offers investors a ‘Positive Impact Portfolio.’ Damien Lardoux, who runs the portfolio, tells me “the clear objective is to invest in companies with high quality products and services that are tackling social and environmental issues.”

Ethical investment has a long history, but has traditionally focused on screening-out or disinvesting ‘unethical’ companies, like tobacco and fossil fuels. The EQ model is about pro-actively investing in companies that deliver a net positive impact on society. Lardoux describes it as “ethical investing 2.0” and it’s increasingly popular. In the last two years, investment in the portfolio has doubled.

EQ, which provides quarterly client impact reports, use the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a measurement framework. Lardoux believes that as millennials make up an increasing proportion of investors, publishing impact data – not just financial data – will be the norm.

WHEB asset management, another B-Corp, is similarly mission-focused, investing in companies tackling global imperatives like climate change and resource scarcity.  WHEB has an ‘impact calculator’ on its website that measures the positive effect of an investment against five environmental indicators. A £10,000 investment, for example, is associated with providing 300,000 litres of drinking water and avoiding 16 tonnes of CO2 emissions. George Latham, managing partner at the fund, insists that “investing in well-run, high-quality companies in strongly growing markets” makes commercial sense.

But while investing in ‘impact’ companies is an ethical thing to do, it doesn’t necessarily create additional value. That’s where investor activism comes in. Take, for example, a renewables firm. Their products are creating a positive impact, reducing dependency on fossil fuels. But internally, they may treat their workers poorly or behave wastefully in their supply chain. Investors who use their clout to change those practices are creating additional impact. That’s what WHEB and EQ Investors tell me they do, and it’s the sort of ‘activism’ shareholders should be engaged in as a matter of routine.

When the Investment Association publish their register this month, a renewed focus on shareholder activism will follow. It’s time that that conversation moves beyond curtailing C-suite pay and onto initiatives that can make a more permanent, well, impact.

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