Nate Yohannes, his three siblings and their parents were exiled from Eritrea shortly after the country’s war for independence in 1991. They ended up in Rochester, New York. Every winter when he goes home to visit, Yohannes says, he jokingly asks his parents: Why such a seemingly random, bitterly cold city? But he knows the real answer.

“A lawyer sponsored us,” Yohannes says, through a refugee resettlement program of the Third Presbyterian Church in Rochester. Yohannes’ father, whose vision is mostly impaired due to stepping on a land mine in 1978, is now a board member of the church. “Being able to come to America and start over on humble beginnings even after stepping on a land mine is one of the reasons why our founders fought bloody battles,” Johannes adds.

His father now works in a probation office, managing cases involving domestic violence. His mother recently retired from a career in nursing. Yohannes went to law school in Buffalo, and clerked for a judge in Western New York. But thanks to another fortunate connection to a mentor in Washington, D.C., he got into the world of finance. “Finance was never in my language. My DNA is fighting for those who are in need and I got that from my father,” Yohannes says. Now, he can’t imagine himself in another industry.

President Barack Obama announced a new federal $1 billion fund for impact investing in 2011, and he eventually called upon Yohannes to finalize its design and make the program permanent. “This program makes sense to me because it fits my theme in life — make a dollar as well as create positive results for our country,” says Yohannes, whom the president officially appointed to serve as senior adviser to the chief investment and innovation officer at the Small Business Administration (SBA).
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The news releases arrived in noteworthy succession throughout 2013. Morgan Stanley, UBS AG, The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and JPMorgan Chase & Co. — some of the biggest names in the financial services industry — announced plans to establish or augment their activities around impact investing. Such investments are made with the intention of generating measurable social and environmental impact alongside appropriate financial returns.

Each firm signaled a different approach and each used diverse language to describe its efforts. But the gist was the same: The significance of investment directed at achieving impact is growing, as is the willingness to engage in it beyond the traditional confines of corporate philanthropy.

Advisers who don’t believe impact investing will play a meaningful role in their own client strategies aren’t seeing the writing on the wall. Investing for meaningful impact will become part of mainstream planning and, in fact, will be the core portfolio for many next-generation investors who stand to inherit upwards of $41 trillion in baby boomer wealth.

A 2013 study by the World Economic Forum found that next-generation investors consistently ranked impact performance as their primary investment criterion, ahead of return. As individuals and institutions look to the financial services industry to supply — and financial planners to advise on — financial products and strategies consistent with these broader goals, firms will have to figure out how to serve a new set of client demands.

RESHAPING GLOBAL PRIORITIES

The deepening embrace of impact investing by the financial services industry mirrors a broader reshaping of global priorities. Skyrocketing deficits, uncertain financial markets and staggering needs have thrust the urgency of impact investing to the forefront. What have emerged as a result are new opportunities, challenges and innovation in all sectors that will help lay the groundwork for a more prosperous future.

This shift was captured in 2010 when 93% of corporate chief executives responding to an Accenture survey indicated that sustainability would be critical to the future success of their companies. These executives also believed that, within a decade, sustainability will be fully meshed with core businesses, fundamentally transforming principal capabilities, processes and systems.

To offer perspective on the financial services sector’s response to the surging interest in impact investing, Impact Economy and the Money Management Institute recently published a special report, “Serving Client Demand for Impact Investing: A Hands-on Guide for Financial Advisors and Senior Management.” The report explores the genesis of the interest by financial service institutions in impact investing, their struggles with certain aspects of implementing these kinds of investment programs and a potential path forward.

While a number of firms are beginning to adapt to the concept, investors, investment funds and advisers nonetheless struggle with different elements of impact investing strategies. Evidence suggests that global financial institutions are succeeding, to varying degrees, in aligning impact investment programs with their responsibility mission but, on the whole, have not succeeded in aligning these programs with their financial mission.

This is the principal reason why impact investing has yet to become a distinct practice area targeted to the mainstream investor. Yet it appears to be on the doorstep, and the very issues limiting the growth of impact investing are, in turn, creating a number of conditions for pushing it forward. Many firms are using components of their institutional platforms — namely corporate philanthropy, Community Reinvestment Act-motivated lending, socially responsible investing or wealth management — to match particular client demand.

Some examples: Citigroup Inc., though not adopting the impact investment label, has nonetheless mobilized resources along similar lines, with a focus on inclusive finance, via the Citi Microfinance business group and Citi Community Capital. In 2013, Deutsche Bank AG created a head office for environmental, social and governance investing to further drive ESG integration in the asset and wealth management areas of the firm. Goldman Sachs’ impact-related investing activities are split into two departments: the Urban Investment Group and the Goldman Sachs Foundation. Social Finance was launched at JPMorgan Chase in 2007, bridging the firm’s corporate responsibility department, which includes global philanthropy and sustainability initiatives, and the investment bank.

Less observable, though, is a push toward aligning these programs with various organizational functions, including advising, originating, trading, managing and distributing capital. Even there, though, progress is beginning to be made. This is evident in Morgan Stanley’s new Institute for Sustainable Investing, which offers wealth management clients access to investment products with values alignment, ESG integration, various sector exposures, and impact-specific products.

“CRAZY UNCLE IN THE ATTIC’

An alternative approach may be to embed impact investing across divisions of an institution. As Mark Sloss, senior portfolio manager and head of premier portfolio services at UBS Wealth Management Americas, said, “Impact investing should not be cloistered like the crazy uncle in the attic.” UBS envisions an “open architecture” model that welcomes the currently unstructured nature of impact investing. As a result, socially responsible and sustainable investing efforts are housed within the firm’s Wealth Management Americas division.

Regardless of the approach financial services firms favor, an impact investment program can be designed in a way that signals important insights about investor preferences to the core wealth or asset management practices of a financial institution, irrespective of whether these investments help to meet institutional philanthropic or compliance mandates (the current added value for most impact investing by financial institutions). In our experience, positioning impact investing in this manner provides financial institutions and advisers with a way to respond to the growing demand.

Embedded within the concept of impact investing (and the wider spectrum of impact-related investing, such as socially responsible investing) are demographic trends that reflect a cultural inclination for “doing well and doing good” simultaneously. This is notably different from the old model of “making money and giving back,” personified by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

A number of trends will begin to influence future decision making, including growing consumer demand from the global poor, the need for resource efficiency and green growth, the rise of the sustainable or “virtuous” consumer, and the massive intergenerational wealth transfer between baby boomers and their beneficiaries.

If impact investing has at times been marginalized within mainstream financial institutions, or “cloistered like the crazy uncle in the attic,” perhaps the time has come to let the crazy uncle out. Despite his eccentricities, he is looking more and more like the rich uncle — aligned with the priorities of the soon-to-be owners of $41 trillion in global capital, and potentially a harbinger of a new force for social good.

William Burckart is the managing director of Impact Economy