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> Posted by Emily Kunz, Financial Inclusion Analyst, CFI
The Investing in Inclusive Finance program at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion explores the practices of investors in inclusive finance. Across areas including risk, governance, stakeholder alignment, and fund management, this blog series highlights what’s being done to help the industry better utilize private capital to develop financial institutions that incorporate social aims.
Impact investing is becoming increasingly alluring. However, anyone who has tried to put their finger on the pulse of this trendy subject has likely been inundated with dense reports focusing on industry minutiae that would take weeks to read. Who has time for this? Not too many it would seem considering that the World Bank recently revealed that a third of the reports it produces have never been downloaded – not even once!
Accordingly, we challenged a team of Credit Suisse Virtual Volunteers (Credit Suisse staff members David Samach, Anne Levonen, and Surender Gounder) to research the world of impact investing – reading industry reports, talking with many of the relevant players, running the numbers – and synthesize this information into a brief and user-friendly overview of the current impact investing landscape.
The team’s findings were presented last month to the Financial Inclusion Equity Council in New York. The Prezi presentation the team gave is featured above, available by clicking the image or here.
Too many definitions fuel industry confusion. If you have trouble comfortably committing to one definition for impact investing, you’re not alone. While researching, the Virtual Volunteers identified a fundamental industry issue: there is no universally agreed-upon definition for impact investing. Competing definitions, as well as models and reports that aren’t aligned, continue to fuel misunderstandings about and within the sector. Ultimately though, the Virtual Volunteers proposed defining impact investing as “an investment approach that intentionally seeks to create both financial return and a positive social or environmental impact that is actively measured.”
> Posted by Alexandra Rizzi, Deputy Director, the Smart Campaign
Over 165 investors and donors have endorsed the Smart Campaign and the Client Protection Principles. But our Campaign staff wanted to dig deeper: what does this support mean in practice? Are investors using the Client Protection Principles in their everyday work? How? Earlier this year, we embarked on a project to find out.
The Campaign worked with three Virtual Volunteers from Credit Suisse - Lloyd Yetton, Meha Jain, and Nicolas Vucekovic – to create a short survey aimed at understanding how investors incorporate client protection into their due diligence, post-investment monitoring, and reporting. The virtual volunteers spoke with representatives from 12 of the leading microfinance investors.¹ The findings, highlighted below, will help the Campaign shape its engagement with this pivotal stakeholder group.
Client Protection Universally Important But Not Uniformly Applied
All the investors interviewed stated that client protection was important to them from both a social perspective and for their bottom line. Most had seen first-hand the positive influence from strong client protection practices as well as the problems and instability that sprang up in their absence. Such universal recognition is an encouraging step forward from earlier days of the Campaign. In addition to understanding the importance of client protection, nearly all respondents said that client protection was already explicitly incorporated into due diligence. Investors are indeed scrutinizing a microfinance institution’s client protection practices before investing in it.
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