This year’s top 10 stories included a peek into AustralianSuper’s international equities build out in London, AMP’s move to slash employee benefits, and plenty of hard-hitting analysis of the issues that matter in institutional investment. But the real story is how readers helped shape all of that coverage.
Orbis’ Stuart Place is riding from Melbourne to the Moon and Back to fund a treatment for the “monster of a disease” that his youngest son was born with. The investment industry is rallying behind him.
Impact investing surges 18% as a new asset class
Fund managers and institutional investors which have been committed to impact investing in their portfolios lifted their exposures to the emerging asset class from US$25.4 billion to US$35.5 billion between 2013 and 2016.
A report – ‘Impact Investing Trends: Evidence of a Growing Industry’ – published by the not-for-profit research and support group Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), follows a survey of 62 investing firms, including Australians Christian Super and venture manager LeapFrog.
Major trends to emerge from the survey results include:
- impact investors are demonstrating strong growth, with assets under management growing by 18 per cent compounded annually from 2013 to 2015
- impact investments are made across the world, in a diverse range of sectors and using various financial instruments, reflecting the wide variety of impact theses and strategies pursued by impact investors
- impact investors are consistently satisfied with both impact and financial performance, and
- the industry is making progress against several key indicators of market growth, despite there being certain barriers remaining to industry development.
Amit Bouri, the New York-based chief executive of GIIN, said that the trend for market growth was reassuring because it indicated room, and hope, for more: “more improvement, more investors entering the market, more impact”.
He said: “The market for impact investing is no longer nascent, but it is also far from being fully formed or matured. As such, the impact investing industry is at a perfect moment for reflection. By looking closely at data from the past few years of impact investing, we can better direct the industry’s trajectory so that this powerful practice can reach its full potential-and faster…
“We have come a long way in building this market, but we have further to go, as the amount of available impact investment capital does not yet come close to matching the scope of the pressing social and environmental problems we face today. This brings me back to the importance of the research contained in this report.”
Membership of GIIN consists of about 90 asset owners, 115 managers and consultants and 50 service provider organisations around the world, which are involved or interested in impact investing.
