ImpactUs, a platform that matches investors with impact investment opportunities, has launched and is spotlighting four organizations ranging in scope from agriculture to affordable housing.
The ImpactUs Marketplace features innovative technology and has well-respected impact investing industry veterans in charge. As a technology platform, ImpactUs can make impact investing more accessible to people by aggregating investors and opportunities.
Reginald Stanley, president and chief executive, and Liz Sessler, vice president for client engagement, are among a team of professionals who bring more than 80 years of finance, community development and leadership experience to the organization.
They have devised a clever infrastructure for investors keen to mission-invest but who seek more transparencies and efficiencies. An historical ding in the impact investing process is opacity. Without a single marketplace or exchange on which impact investments are listed and liquidity is bred, many social investors demure from committing capital. ImpactUs has the opportunity to change that mentality, if not the capital structure.
Indeed, Stanley says harnessing advanced technology to simplify and grow impact investing is one of the pillars of ImpactUs.
ImpactUs has the foundational support of some of the leading organizations in the social impact sphere, including the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners and City First Enterprises.
ImpactUs is in a limited access, invite-only phase, but its goal is to grow and expand to connect investors and advisors with mission-driven institutions.
The platform provides end-to-end transactional and capital management capabilities. As a broker-dealer, ImpactUs believes it can leverage technology to make impact investing accessible to all.
“Collaboration and community has always been core to ImpactUs’ mission,” Sessler says.
These are the market's four initial investments:
• Iroquois Valley Farms, a restorative farmland finance company providing land access to organic family farmers, with a focus on the next generation.
• Shared Interest, which utilizes impact investors’ capital as collateral to unlock local capital in Africa and build capacity for entrepreneurs in low-income communities.
• Envest Microfinance, a firm that uses capital to enable universal access to financial services to create the conditions necessary to empower the world’s low-income people to meet their basic needs.
• CommonBond Communities, the largest nonprofit provider of affordable housing with services in the Upper Midwest, using impact capital to acquire and preserve multifamily housing for moderate-income workforce households who support the economy and communities.
At Private Wealth’s impact investing conference last autumn, Sessler spoke of the need to democratize the impact investing process. Accredited, high-net-worth investors have been the driving force of the impact investing movement since it began in earnest under that moniker a decade ago. Now, with still less than $100 billion in assets, impact investing is poised to generate mass appeal because of more open platforms such as ImpactUs and the embracement of retail brokerages and funds.
Impact investments generate financial returns while aiming to solve (or impact) social problems.
