Watch time: 3 minutes 5 seconds
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Hello all, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Georgina, Editorial Director with Institutional Investor.
Welcome back to our fireside chat series, Not the Time to Be Idle, Taking Action in Today's Credit Markets with RBC. I have with me today, Ron Homer, one of the pioneers of impact investing, and Chief Strategist of the US team with RBC. Ron, why don't you tell us a little bit about the evolution of impact investing?
Well, 25 years ago when I started the Access Capital Community Investing strategy, most of the impact investing programs that existed were, considered quirky, not necessarily aimed at making a financial return as much as having an impact.
They consisted of foundations having program related investments, some special lending programs around minority business like minority enterprise, small business investment corporations. But over time and, where we are today is that financial returns are just as important as the impact. In fact, many people believe you can't have sustainable impact without providing strong financial returns. So, many strategies are looking for both the social alpha and the impact alpha, and also the areas in which impact investment has expanded is quite comprehensive, including most of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
So it gets into education, healthcare, clean energy, environment, a wide variety of different topics. So would say that impact investment has now gone from niche to close to mainstream.
It's a little political these days, but I think over the long term, as we've seen in Europe and other places, that impact investing is here to stay and will be an important part of the landscape in making investments.
Well, that's great to hear and thank you very much, Ron. We've been speaking again with Ron Homer of RBC on the evolution of impact investing. Please stay tuned for our next installment, where we take a deeper dive into the themes around impact and where the opportunities lie. Thanks for watching.