ImpactAlpha Podcasts

In your briefing this week: pandemics, leaks, and billion dollar funds. Plus, Dennis Price on emerging impact managers. 

Your impact briefing for February 21st, featuring the week's headlines, Agents of Impact, and new info on off-grid electricity in Africa.

Dave Chen of Equilibrium Capital joins David Bank to make bold predictions for 2020 on another episode of our special series: Institutional Shift.

On the latest edition of ImpactAlpha’s Returns on Investment podcast, host Brian Walsh suggests that the ‘technology’ of ESG and impact investing has passed the early-adopter stage and entered the early majority, gaining momentum among companies, asset managers and banks.

“The positive news is that more and more people know what we are talking about,” Bertrand Badré says on the most recent ImpactAlpha podcast. “The negative news is there is not enough action.” The former World Bank official and founder of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital (the name comes from a French surrealist poem) says needed changes in the financial system were not given enough thought w...

The Decapitalization of the Fossil Fuel Industry by ImpactAlpha

“Global thematic impact didn’t exist, so we decided to build it ourselves," says Erika Karp in the latest ROI. Cornerstone’s Access Impact Fund is a Nasdaq-listed mutual fund that for a minimum $1,000 investment offers access to sub-advisors looking for thematic investments in small-, medium- and large-cap companies across geographies. Karp, formerly the head of global sector research at UBS Inves...

The popular protests that drove the GSG Impact Summit out of Santiago, Chile, added “a poignant urgency” to the first day of the global gathering of impact investors in Buenos Aires, Sir Ronald Cohen said in a podcast interview with ImpactAlpha’s David Bank.

Dave Chen of Equilibrium Capital returns for another edition of Institutional Shift.

Now that big private equity players are spinning up impact funds left and right, the impact of the rest of their investments is getting a lot more scrutiny as well. ImpactAlpha’s roundtable regulars recorded a podcast episode keying on Blackstone’s investments in Brazilian agricultural processing plants linked to deforestation in the Amazon. But other private equity giants have stepped up with the...

In a counter-intuitive shift, the estimated four million global youth climate strikers who took to the streets last week may be more pro-business than recalcitrant heads of state gathering at the United Nations intent on slow-walking climate action. The U.S., Brazil and Japan, for example, have not even asked to speak at today’s Climate Action Summit, where 60 or so countries are expected to prese...

Updated Corporate Purpose Signals Broader Definitions of Fiduciary Duty and Materiality by ImpactAlpha

Overcoming Systemic Bias in Investing Means Challenging Power and Pattern Matching by ImpactAlpha

The latest Returns on Investment podcast takes on the challenge of how investors can help make sure workers get a better shake. In a low-unemployment economy, it’s not only jobs, but quality jobs that are needed to drive broader prosperity that is inclusive of workers of all ages and skills.

The roundtable regulars aim to trace the connections between the impact investing project writ large and the current political climate, without violating our pledge against armchair analysis of electability, swing-state appeal or fundraising prowess.

On the latest episode of our special Institutional Shift series of conversations, Dave Chen and David Bank review their predictions from six months ago and look ahead to 2020. On the docket: climate-change investing, plastics, market segmentation, and product development.

A changing climate is changing the climate inside one of the world’s largest asset managers. Clients of Goldman Sachs Assets Management, which manages assets on behalf of wealthy families, pensions and foundations, endowments and insurance companies. These parties have always expected the firm to recite key financial metrics about the companies they own. But increasingly, says Hugh Lawson, the hea...

One perk of both owning and managing your own capital: you get to set the rules. Blue Haven Initiative, the $500 million family office of Liesel Pritzker Simmons and Ian Simmons, has for a decade committed to integrate impact across 100% of its investable portfolio. In episode 7 of Beyond Tradeoffs, David speaks with Liesel about Blue Haven's approach.

In episode 6 of Beyond Tradeoffs, David speaks with Sandeep Farias of Elevar Equity about their approach to early stage investing in developing markets.

On episode 5 of our special series, Beyond Tradeoffs, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, David interviews Roy Swan and Christine Looney about Ford Foundations Mission Investment strategy.

In Episode 4 of ROI's Beyond Trade-offs series, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, Vishal Mehta of Lok Capital recalls how the Delhi-based impact investor blended venture capital and grant funding to build markets for financial services, health care and education for low-income Indians.

Today on ROI, we feature an interview with Ommeed Sathe of Prudential Financial in the third episode of Beyond Tradeoffs, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network. Prudential, a serious institutional investor with nearly $1.4 trillion in assets, is demonstrating that is possible to incorporate impact strategies within the norms and constraints faced by institutional investors. Their $800 mil...

In the second episode of ImpactAlpha’s “Beyond Trade-offs” podcast series, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, Goldman Sachs’ John Goldstein charts the development of “risk-return-impact” frameworks that meet the needs of institutional investors. One of his jobs, he says, “is to help Goldman’s investors do better at doing what they do by incorporating environmental, social and governan...

In a new series of podcasts produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, ImpactAlpha asked a range of investors, from fully “market-rate,” to unapologetically concessionary, what lies… Beyond Tradeoffs. What we heard is that investors of all types are finding strategies to avoid specific and systemic risks, to be aligned with long-term trends, to generate tangible and measureable social and env...

Hidden within the $3.8 trillion market for U.S. municipal bonds are not only mispriced social and environmental risks, but huge potential for on-the-ground impact in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods. On this episode, David Bank chats with Eric Glass about how Alliance-Bernstein approaches municipal bonds with an impact lens.