ImpactAlpha Podcasts

A changing climate is changing the climate inside one of the world’s largest asset managers. Clients of Goldman Sachs Assets Management, which manages assets on behalf of wealthy families, pensions and foundations, endowments and insurance companies. These parties have always expected the firm to recite key financial metrics about the companies they own. But increasingly, says Hugh Lawson, the head of ESG and impact investing at Goldman, clients are demanding the big Wall Street money manager know more about the qualitative aspects of what those businesses do and how they do it. In the latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Returns on Investment podcast, David Bank dug in with Lawson about how greater investor urgency around climate, and confidence in low-carbon investment strategies, is changing investing (or isn’t).

One perk of both owning and managing your own capital: you get to set the rules. Blue Haven Initiative, the $500 million family office of Liesel Pritzker Simmons and Ian Simmons, has for a decade committed to integrate impact across 100% of its investable portfolio. In episode 7 of Beyond Tradeoffs, David speaks with Liesel about Blue Haven's approach.

In episode 6 of Beyond Tradeoffs, David speaks with Sandeep Farias of Elevar Equity about their approach to early stage investing in developing markets.

On episode 5 of our special series, Beyond Tradeoffs, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, David interviews Roy Swan and Christine Looney about Ford Foundations Mission Investment strategy.

In Episode 4 of ROI's Beyond Trade-offs series, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, Vishal Mehta of Lok Capital recalls how the Delhi-based impact investor blended venture capital and grant funding to build markets for financial services, health care and education for low-income Indians.

Today on ROI, we feature an interview with Ommeed Sathe of Prudential Financial in the third episode of Beyond Tradeoffs, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network. Prudential, a serious institutional investor with nearly $1.4 trillion in assets, is demonstrating that is possible to incorporate impact strategies within the norms and constraints faced by institutional investors. Their $800 million impact portfolio is invested with a specific mandate to show measurable benefits in financial inclusion, affordable housing preservation, educational excellence, workforce development and sustainable agriculture and other areas.

In the second episode of ImpactAlpha’s “Beyond Trade-offs” podcast series, produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, Goldman Sachs’ John Goldstein charts the development of “risk-return-impact” frameworks that meet the needs of institutional investors. One of his jobs, he says, “is to help Goldman’s investors do better at doing what they do by incorporating environmental, social and governance into how we invest for all our clients.”

In a new series of podcasts produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, ImpactAlpha asked a range of investors, from fully “market-rate,” to unapologetically concessionary, what lies… Beyond Tradeoffs. What we heard is that investors of all types are finding strategies to avoid specific and systemic risks, to be aligned with long-term trends, to generate tangible and measureable social and environmental benefits and to otherwise meet their objectives – all along the continuum of risks and returns.

Hidden within the $3.8 trillion market for U.S. municipal bonds are not only mispriced social and environmental risks, but huge potential for on-the-ground impact in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods. On this episode, David Bank chats with Eric Glass about how Alliance-Bernstein approaches municipal bonds with an impact lens.

According to billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, capitalism is not working well for the majority of Americans. In a recent essay he argues that it is producing self-reinforcing spirals up for the haves and down for the have-nots and that these conditions pose an existential risk for the U.S. In the latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Returns on Investment podcast, the roundtable regulars took up the challenge as well, with a provocative discussion of inequality and the age-old tension between capital and labor.