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Bringing Together Money and Meaning: More Than a Tagline

At ThirtyNorth Investments, we steadfastly believe that investment decisions begin and end with an understanding of what money means to you (so much so that we made it our company tagline: Bringing Together Money and Meaning). After all, people don’t seek to accumulate wealth just for the sake of it; they do so with a goal in mind—a vision of how money will help make their lives, their children’s lives, their community, or their world better tomorrow than today.

What we didn’t anticipate when we chose this tagline was that it would foreshadow what is being considered the most important investment trend of the next decade.

Impact Investing—also known as Sustainable Investing or Environment, Social, Governance (“ESG”)—offers investors positive social impact alongside positive financial returns. Not to be confused with philanthropy, Impact Investing is predicated on the belief that companies that act responsibly with regard to ESG perform better financially.

This burgeoning investment strategy was the focus of Barron’s first Impact Investing Summit earlier this summer, where one thing was made clear: Impact Investing is here to stay.

Seeing the opportunity to amplify their financial gains while also encouraging socially responsible corporate behavior, it’s no wonder more and more investors are adopting investment strategies that incorporate an ESG lens:

  • 70% of institutional investors say they are integrating sustainable investing into their investment process1
  • The majority of millennials, Gen X and women believe that a company’s track record in environmental, social and governance is an important consideration for investing. In fact, 37% of all high net worth investors are reviewing their portfolios for impact investments2
  • 90% of women surveyed globally said making a positive impact on society is important when considering investment decisions, and 77% indicated that they want to invest in companies with diversity in leadership3

However, while it’s just now hitting the investment mainstream, Impact Investing is not entirely new. In fact, ThirtyNorth Investments created our own Impact Investing offering, the Women Impact Strategy, more than two years ago. A carefully crafted portfolio of 50 companies with gender diversity among their corporate leadership teams, we created the Women Impact Strategy after reviewing data4 that demonstrated what we already intuitively knew: companies with more women at the top deliver excess returns.

We are proud to be counted among the individuals and organizations acting early and with conviction in the Impact Investing space, including hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones (whose JUST ETF, which ranks companies based on their social impact, launched this summer) and Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, who wrote to his investors earlier this year, “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

I continue to be amazed by the breadth of companies offering new ESG funds every day. As Impact Investment options continue to grow, so too do the possibilities for making more money, and for making that money more meaningful. It is a wonderful sign of things to come.

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1Sustainable Signals: Asset Owners Embrace Sustainability, Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing  June 18, 2018

22018 Insights on Wealth and Worth, U.S Trust, 2018

3 Harnessing the Power of the Purse: Female Investors and Global Opportunities for Growth, Center for Talent Innovation, 2014

4 The CS Gender 3000: The Reward for Change, Credit Suisse Institute, September 2016

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All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss.  There are no assurances that an investor’s portfolio will match or outperform any particular benchmark.

 

July 24, 2018   By Suzanne Mestayer

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