The UK saw the launch of its Impact Investing Institute (III) on November 28. It’s hard to get excited about yet more impact initiatives or coalitions, but this one I can get on board with.
For a start, it’s consolidating two government initiatives into one – the UK National Advisory Board on Impact Investing and the Implementation Taskforce on Growing a Culture on Social Impact Investing in the UK. The reduction in verbosity alone must be worth applauding.
Indeed one of the aims of the III is to help stop the noise around impact investments and provide curated information for the public, financial advisers, investment managers, pension funds, regulators and policymakers: a one-stop shop of all we need to know, rather than the 245,000,000 results a Google search of ‘impact investing’ brings up.
The institute is tasked with helping the development of impact investing standards. It is working with the Impact Measurement Project on the convergence and standardization of measurement and reporting of impact, and on developing a digital platform to allow asset managers and owners to report their impact in a more comparable way.
‘Impact’ is still seen as a vague term, although the EU taxonomy for ‘green’ should help on the environmental angle.
