ImpactAlpha Podcasts

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.

According to billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, capitalism is not working well for the majority of Americans. In a recent essay he argues that it is producing self-reinforcing spirals up for the haves and down for the have-nots and that these conditions pose an existential risk for the U.S. In the latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Returns on Investment podcast, the roundtable regulars took up...

The dramatic fall from grace of Bill McGlashan, co-founder and former CEO of TPG Growth and The Rise Fund, after being indicted in the Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal, Rose-Smith suggests, may say more about private-equity and alternative-investment asset management in general than about impact investing in particular.

Are newspapers and newsmagazines "impact investments"? And are the billionaires who buy them making a positive impact? Listen in as David, Imogen, and Brian take up the topic of impact investing in news media on the latest episode of ROI

Newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has galvanized the political debate with a proposed Green New Deal that would rely primarily on government financing to pay for the required investments in climate-friendly agriculture, transportation, buildings, manufacturing and, of course, energy. In the latest Returns on Investment podcast, roundtable regulars Brian Walsh and Imogen Rose-Smith tried...

Will it be risk – rather than returns – that drives impact investment? Major companies are starting to face the very practical implications of climate change, as indicated by responses to CDP, the U.K. organization formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project. The latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Returns on Investment podcast explores the connection between such risks and the mobilization of inv...

The three-letter acronym for “environmental, social and governance” has broken out from the wonky world of finance and into subway ads and online pitches for a slew of new ESG mutual funds, ETFs and other financial services. How such “non-financial” factors affect financial performance has been a matter of hot debate for several years. As ESG breaks into the mainstream, the podcast’s roundtable re...

Join us for half-dozen or so forecasts from Equilibrium Capital's Dave Chen, who returned to ImpactAlpha's Returns on Investment podcast for a New Year's check-in on the progress of the "institutional shift" in impact investing. As Dave says, "Everybody loves a list."

We ring a bell and joke about taking a drink every time we can work the phrase “impact alpha” into a Returns on Investment podcast. We had to suspend the stunt to discuss a new report,“The Alpha in Impact.” The report pulled back the curtain on 29 investments from 13 funds to demonstrate that impact be a driver of returns, not just a drag. Our roundtable regulars discuss.

As the climate hangs in the balance, policy momentum, investor sentiment and most of all global leadership will be crucial to sustain the global energy transition and, while we’re at it, economic transformation, that are both so urgently needed.

In late October 2018 US-SIF released their bi-annual report measuring the size of the impact market. By their calculations, responsible and impact investments now total 12 trillion dollars in the United States - representing a quarter of all US assets under professional management. Can this amount, a 38% increase since 2016, be seen as an unmitigated success? "Not so fast," cautions the ROI roundt...

When 2019 comes around congress will once again be divided. Could an impact oriented infrastructure bill make it to the president's desk? Our roundtable discusses.

ImpactAlpha’s editor and CEO David Bank and Paul van Zyl talk about impact investing and social entrepreneurship from the Conduit in London.

In its daily Brief and on its website, ImpactAlpha writes a lot about the challenges and triumphs of impact entrepreneurs. In this week’s Returns on Invesment podcast, host Brian Walsh put the questions to the company’s own mission-driven entrepreneurs: How’s the business going?

Join David Bank and Dave Chen as they continue our special series, Institutional Shift. The latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Returns on Investment podcast takes stock of the state of impact investing at pension funds and other large institutional investors.

Lower-than-expected risk. Higher-than-expected impact. Access to off-grid electricity is emerging as an impact investing success story across the developing world.

The impact investing community seems to be in one of its cyclical discussions about who and what should count as impact. The latest Returns on Investment podcast takes up the growing concern about “impact-washing,” the use of impact jargon or marketing to raise money or burnish reputations without delivering real impact or, in some cases, causing negative impacts.

What will it take for investors to make the big bets? ImpactAlpha’s latest Returns on Investment podcast took on what roundtable regular Imogen Rose-Smith, an investment fellow at the University of California, called “the disconnect between rhetoric and reality.”

The latest Returns on Investment podcast takes up the case of the $1 billion Abraaj Growth Markets Health Fund and impact investing failures more broadly. The health fund, which was pursuing an ambitious effort to build comprehensive healthcare networks in the megacities of the 21st century – think Lagos and Karachi and Mumbai – is now embroiled in the larger scandal that has engulfed Abraaj Group...

Impact investing types, it seems, are proud globalists. That optimistic, connected, cross-border approach to challenges, solutions and human relationships puts them in a unique position in this peculiar historic moment when walls are going up and strangers are suspect. At the same time, the essential precondition of investing – having capital to invest – means most investors are largely distant fr...

In the latest Returns on Investment podcast, our roundtable regulars take up the April memo from the Department of Labor that tried, albeit weakly, to walk back the Obama-era guidance about how fiduciaries could consider ESG factors.

The obsession with financial returns that for decades kept major institutional investors away is now pushing them towards a serious accounting of environmental risks. Ashby Monk joins Dave Chen, the chair of Equilibrium Capital, and David Bank, editor of Impact Alpha, on this episode of Returns on Investment: Institutional Shift.