Paul: I know you are focusing on Veris’ work in the gender lens portfolio development and asset management. How do you identify firms for investment?
Lori: Some of the things we consider are whether the strategy supports women entrepreneurs gaining access to capital, promotes women in leadership and creates products for women and girls. Often there is not a specific product that covers all facets of the client’s goal. We incorporate multiple strategies and products that, as much as possible, achieve the goal.
The client’s individual priorities may bias or change the way we structure the portfolio. For example, some clients want to have more impact with women and girls at the bottom of the economic pyramid vs. support for women in corporate leadership roles in the U.S.
Paul: How is access to private and public market capital for gender lens portfolios developing?
Lori: There are more investment products in the private and public markets. Since 2013, the number of product offerings has nearly doubled, so many products mentioned in our recent Gender Lens 2.0 whitepaper didn’t exist five years ago.
Paul: You have wealthy family, family office and private foundation clients with multiple generation stakeholders. Tell us about these clients.
Lori: Yes, we work with a range of clients where we see multi-generational conversations happening. We have very innovative fifty, sixty year-old clients who are giving us new ideas and modeling good stewardship of family assets for their children, as well as millennials who are encouraging their families to do more impact investing. We have several young clients, for example, who have led their families in allocating a portion of their family's wealth towards impact strategies and creating their investment policy statement (IPS).
Paul: You mentioned the family’s IPS.
Lori: It’s an investment policy statement, which is a good thing for any investor to have. It outlines the investment parameters, allocations and acceptable risk and return goals. We include an impact priorities section, which talks about the guidelines for impact investing. For example, if climate change is a priority, what are the opportunities and does the client want to include both inclusionary as well as exclusionary guidelines.
Paul: I have heard from other millennial professionals in the industry that as a generation you focus on sustainability as consumers and investors.
Lori: Millennial clients are coming to us more informed and having done more research than older generations, and they have an impact investing vocabulary that older generations don’t have. Some have studied social entrepreneurship and impact investing in undergrad or grad school. They also participate in online and in-person peer networks. They have a higher level of expectation about what they want and what they envision as possible. As retail investors, they are interested in doing more of the research work and use crowdsourcing for that activity.