The purpose of this Guiding Principle is to help investors, asset managers and other actors in the financial industry to differentiate between Regular, Responsible, Sustainable and Impact investments.
Impact has become a buzzword – often used for anything that is susceptible of having any kind of positive result in the near or far future, directly or indirectly.
It is important to distinguish between Impact investments and Sustainable or Responsible investments. Primarily for transparency reasons; investors and other stakeholders should know and understand what they invest in in each of those categories, what they can expect in terms or results or outcomes and what demands that can be made on measurement and reporting.
Differentiating between these investment categories is also important in order to preserve impact integrity and avoid green and social washing.
The aim of this Guiding Principle is to strengthen impact integrity in our ecosystem, increase transparency and make sure that more and more capital flows to investments that can demonstrate true and measurable impact.
Our Guiding Principles are always work in progress. We will continue to refine them as the knowledge and experience in the impact space grow. We welcome feedback from users of the Principles and we actively seek thoughts and suggestions from users.
This Guiding Principle was last updated on November 15th 2021, and represents, in our opinion, the best approach to differentiating between these investment categories that we know of to date.
We hope you will find it useful in your investment and impact strategies. Please do not hesitate to send feedback, thoughts and questions to our Secretary, Jenny Carenco: jenny@swedishnab.se.