Happy New Year!
This year, one of the exciting new developments we have planned is to broaden the Worthstone ‘book-ends’ on the impact spectrum to deliver more investment content.
We are detecting a ground swell of change in investor attitudes towards achieving an intentional and demonstrable positive social outcome, as well as a financial return, from their portfolios. This is evidenced by the increasing number of mainstream fund managers that are publishing research which acknowledges this development. These fund managers are, in turn, forecasting the need to adapt their approach in order to deliver on these fundamental investor objectives.
I’ve also been tracking activity in the US, where already there is an established network of investors with significant capital holdings, who aim to deploy 100% of their investable assets to achieve impact and where their advisers deploy that wealth on their behalf.
We realise that if a retail client is seeking advice from a positive impact perspective, and this is limited (as is presently the case) to the narrow field of social investment, our impact expertise is not working to its full potential and won’t always meet all your and your client’s needs. It is therefore becoming clear to me that we need to broaden our focus in order to equip you to meet what I anticipate will be a growing requirement from an increasing number of your clients.
So Worthstone is therefore planning to broaden its offering to include the wider scope of what is termed ‘Impact’ investment in the G8 Social Impact Investment Taskforce ‘spectrum of capital’ below. As a starting point, using this as our frame of reference, we’ll explore and map what’s included in this ‘Impact’ block. I’ll be expanding on what this means and issuing our roadmap in the next couple of months.
This is what I refer to as broadening the Worthstone ‘book-ends’ on the impact spectrum!
I wish you all an impactful 2017.
Best regards,
Gavin
If you would like to read our impact report for 2016 please click here.