Kieron Boyle’s Post

Transcript

Impact investing is reshaping the financial landscape, combining profit with positive social and environmental impact. In this interview, we speak with the Impact Investing Institute to explore how this approach is influencing the future of investing and driving meaningful, sustainable change in global markets. I want to care if we could just start off, what is the mission of the Impact Investing Institute and give us an idea of some of the current issues that you're working on. So the Impact Investing Institute is a nonprofit that was set up by the UK government, and we were set up with a really simple mission. It's quite hard to pull off, but that mission is about how do you transform capital markets? So that their fairer, that they're greener, that they're more resilient, so they work better for people across the UK and around the world. And the way which we do that is we accelerate the field of impact investing and impact investing for those people haven't come across it before is about investing, its commercial investing, but it's investing with intentionality for positive outcomes for people and the planet. And that really informs the sort of work that we do. So we focus on real world challenges and think about well, what role does. Capital have to solving those, so we look at the questions like the net zero transition. Go to change the world around us. But how is that a fair and inclusive transition? How is it gonna work for communities across the country? Now you've carried out some research and that research has shown that the size of UK impact investing has seen significant growth. Are there any barriers that still lie there? But most importantly, where are the opportunities? Fortunately, you've seen many more opportunities and barriers, but there are both. Well, firstly, it's one of those rare things. It's a genuine good news story because this is about money that's doing well for people and doing well for the planet. And this is growing. It's growing 10% year on year. So it's now a ��76 billion. Market. That really matters that growth because it's it's purposeful capital, but it's been growing at a time that UK managed assets as a whole had been declining. So it really points to this being a trend. So where are the opportunities? What we're seeing is that more impact investment is happening and it's spreading into different areas. So firstly was mostly focused on private markets, but now we're seeing much more impact investment going on in public markets, which is where most of the world's money is. There are still some. Areas out there that are research showed firstly, there's still further work needed on how would you define impacts and how can you be confident that that impact is is happening. And then also because it is a new field, we just need more and more examples of it for people to be confident in the track record of those impact investments for more capital to come in. Now when it comes to partnerships and the government, where do those partnership opportunities lie and what sort of success would that? Look like, and when I talk about partnerships, I'm talking about government working with private capital, there are huge opportunities for for government step back a bit. The big thing that's happened over the past 15 years is that more and more money, more and more businesses have been focused on the question of how do they do things with purpose? How do they do things that are commercially successful but also good for people, good they're employees, good for the communities that they're based in and that. There's a lot of money now that's out there. So the big opportunity for government is to partner with that. So we've got a new government that's come in, it's got big ambitions and it's opportunity is to partner with private capital. But what really matters is, is there alignment? Is that private capital trying to achieve similar things to what the government is? And in this instance, the answer is yes. So what does that practically look like? That could mean more money going into health and preventative health. It could be more money going into inclusive growth across the UK. And there are billions and billions of pounds of investment that could flow in if government and private capital and impact capital can partner Better Together. OK, five years, we're looking five years ahead. Where does the future of? Impact investing lie. What does it look like and what would you like to see five years on South? The UK impact investment market is ��80 billion in size. Globally it's about a trillion # market. In five years time we'd like it to be double that size. So if we had another trillion dollars coming into the impact space, that would be fantastic if that money was deployed in more effective ways. So for example, was thinking about how all money can balance its environmental footprint, its social footprint. Alongside its commercial returns, that would be really powerful, but very practically here in the UK we see those opportunities for billions and billions of pounds to go into things like better education, better health, improved towns, cities that everybody feels the benefit of hearing both. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, thank you.