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Hello, and thank you for joining us. I'm Georgina Tzanetos with Institutional Investor, and this is our fireside chat series where we discuss strategies and impact investing and liquidity management. I have with me today Mindy Frye, Institutional Portfolio Manager for Fixed Income with RBC.
Mindy, what are some trends you see as you look forward in impact investing today?
Well, there are quite a few actually. First, I would definitely expect to see continued growth in that clean energy space. Both again, because of the Inflation Reduction Act and all of the opportunities that have been brought about because of that, but also because climate change is really leaving us with no option but to do something and to start thinking about this.
Separate from that, I think FinTech solutions are going to be playing a bigger role over the coming years. I look back to some of the barriers around access to home ownership. For example, decades ago, it wasn't necessarily due to lack of opportunity to make loans, but really was because it was unprofitable to do so because of the high transaction costs.
So with the advent of FinTech solutions, we saw a dramatic reduction in those transaction costs, which made lending more accessible, and then provided more opportunities to structure securities to meet impact investor goals. As new barriers arise, I think we'll see more FinTech companies working on solutions to make impact investments more accessible in that space, home ownership and in other sectors.
Another area where I see a trend is that there are going to be impact strategies that go beyond sort of the traditional themes of maybe housing and environmental sustainability. I think those are a couple of things that come to mind when you think of impact investing, but I really would expect that there's a growth in impact strategies that address other issues like food supply or food waste issues, education, healthcare, deforestation, and other interests that align with investor values that maybe there aren't today, a lot of targeted solutions for.
One other area I've seen and that I think will continue to grow is that I think often people don't associate short duration or cash-like investments with an opportunity for ESG and impact, but there really are some options in this space and I think that will continue to grow. So there are accessible solutions out there already that don't require long investment horizons or, illiquidity in capital lockups.
One place I've seen more demand for this on the investor side is from corporate treasury groups where there are a lot of stakeholders to consider. Then there are also somewhat restricted investment policy frameworks to work around, especially when it comes to duration or maturity constraints.
So the problem for a long time was that with interest rates at zero, there really wasn't much incentive to pursue an impact strategy in that very short duration space because there was no yield to be had. But now as we've seen rates get substantially higher over the past year, year and a half, we're seeing investors come back to the table and see what is possible on the very short end of the curve.
A couple of examples where impact can be achieved in a more cash-like security would be commercial paper. For example, supporting higher educational facilities or international development finance corporation issues, which have weekly resets, so they're very short duration, and they support development projects in developing nations, but are still US dollar denominated. So that's one area where I think we could see growth.
And then lastly, just to close out where I see the future of impact going. I think there is going to be a continued emphasis on the importance of impact measurement and reporting because investors really want to understand the social and environmental outcomes of their investments. And I think there's increased regulation around that, and probably rightly so, given the sometimes lack of transparency. So, I think we're going to see investors demanding more transparency around, not just the return profile of their impact investments, but really what social and environmental outcomes are they investing in.
Well, thank you very much, Mindy, and thank you all for joining us. Again, we've been speaking with Mindy Frye, Institutional Portfolio Manager of Fixed Income with RBC. This concludes our fireside chat interviews with Mindy Frye, but please stay tuned for our next installment. Thank you for watching.