Impact investing comes in different flavors, and most of the opportunities are debt instruments on the private side. The genre is dogged with a reputation of being a source of low financial returns and murky societal returns that are hard to measure. Regarding the latter, different organizations involved in this space are devising metrics to measure the various impacts of impact investing.
As for the former, Kirshman noted there doesn’t have to be a trade-off between financial returns and positive impact. He cited a recent report from Cambridge Associates and the Global Impact Investing Network that analyzed the financial performance of market-rate private equity and venture capital impact investing funds and found that market-rate returns are possible in impact investing.
Sustainable, or impact investing applies to more than just traditional impact areas such as funding projects that bring potable water to poor people in Africa or build quality low-income housing in American cities. Increasingly, the concept of sustainability is also creeping into the boardrooms of major corporations.
“Companies that are better at creating a more regenerative and sustainable economy in the future will perform better financially,” Kirshman offered. “It just makes common sense. That’s why it’s always a head shaker for me when people say, ‘If I do responsible investing it’ll cost me money.’ But the flip side is if you don’t do it it’ll cost you the whole society, so let’s try to identify these costs and put a price on some of these things [such as the cost of creating and throwing out goods in a disposable society] that so far have gone unpriced.”
Many financial advisors get involved with impact investing after one of their clients express an interest in it. “The main idea is to identify the intention of the client, understand what they have and what they are trying to accomplish, and help them move to wherever they are to a better place whether it’s from a financial perspective in terms of how they construct a portfolio, but also from an impact or socially responsible perspective in terms of the strategies they might use because there are different strategies to use across different asset classes,” Kirshman says. “As an advisor, you have to be willing to take that step to be a partner with your clients.”
Kirshman spoke to an audience that included financial advisors, institutional money managers and family office managers, among others. Obviously, they are interested in the impact investment space and were sympathetic to his main arguments. But not everyone is, of course.
In the world of impact investing there are first adopters and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, those who are religiously opposed to it and feel it’s a bunch of hokum. But potential growth in the sector will come from those in-between. “There’s a whole wide group of people in the middle who are open-minded and willing to look at facts and studies,” Kirshman said.
But as one audience member posited, impact investing’s growth is hamstrung somewhat because of the different terms applied to the space, which causes a marketing problem for the overall genre.
He articulated that if you can raise awareness that this is an option, then you could drive more demand because there’s a latent desire among millennials and others who want to help the world.
“As a class, if socially responsible/impact managers could agree on how to categorize themselves in a global sense—maybe impact investing is the best terminology to do it—and then market it more effectively as an asset class, you’d get a lot more money coming into it,” he said.