Impact Investing’s Next Challenge

Since the term “impact investing” was coined by the Rockefeller Foundation 15 years ago, the approach has challenged the common narrative that investors must settle for lower returns if they want to bring about change.

But there’s now another major hurdle to the mainstreaming of impact investing: standardising impact measurements to equip investors to make choices that best align with their goals.

“In financial markets, we have a whole infrastructure that allows any investor to make financial comparisons. But to determine impact we don’t yet have the same tools and resources available,” says Sophia Sunderji, research manager at the Global Impact Investing Network, an industry research and analytics nonprofit group.

Much like investors can compare mutual funds with similar styles and objectives, investors should be able to make decisions about investments by comparing impact, Sunderji says.

The challenge is twofold. The first is accurately measuring impact—it can take years for an investment to produce results, and it can be difficult to prove direct cause and effect.

Possibly even more challenging is standardising the data so that one investment’s impact results can be fairly contrasted with another’s.

But the industry is making strides. Sunderji is leading GIIN’s effort to establish a go-to industry resource for due diligence on impact. This involves establishing core metrics for each type of impact goal from infrastructure and education to climate change and ocean pollution. With a combination of industry research and detailed reporting by impact investments, GIIN is crunching the data and quantifying impact.

The objective is to standardize data—using factors relevant to the area of intended impact—on GIIN’s existing database called Iris Plus (IRIS+) to make it easily comparable.

For example, for impact investors who want to help the estimated 1.7 billion adults globally without access to basic financial services, relevant metrics may be how many loans were issued to small businesses in underserved areas or the number of people who accessed financial services for the first time. Such data are finely sliced and diced by factors such as gender, region, asset, or credit size to be more meaningful for comparative purposes.

GIIN’s standardization process also seeks to evaluate future outcomes, Sunderji says. An investor might issue an impressive number of microloans, but how many of their recipients went on to create successful enterprises?

Tools are also evolving to measure the impact of investing in opportunity zones, which were established in 2018 under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The law provides capital-gains tax incentives for investments in opportunity zones, which are areas identified as economically distressed.

The industry has seen average annual capital growth in the past three years of about 17% to just over $700 billion, driven in part by rising interest among institutional investors. Last year, insurance companies and pension funds each accounted for about 4% of impact capital, up from nearly nil five years ago, according to GIIN.

“Institutional investors are fiduciaries—they are finance-first and impact-second because they can’t

be sacrificing returns,” says Vikram Gandhi, founder and CEO of New Delhi-based VSG Capital Advisors and senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School. “They wouldn’t be investing if they didn’t think they could make market-rate returns.”

A next big driver of capital will be the estimated $40 trillion in wealth that will transfer from baby boomers to younger heirs over the next two decades, Gandhi says, adding that subsequent generations are more than three times more likely to include impact investments in their portfolios.

As tools to measure and compare impact are honed, enabling investors to choose effective investments, it is not just the capital that will be magnified—but its effectiveness in bringing about change.

Wedding planner Sterling Boulet has some advice for brides-to-be regarding lab-grown diamonds, which cost a fraction of the natural ones.

“If you’re trying to get your man to propose, they’ll propose faster if you offer this as an option,” says Boulet, of Raleigh, N.C. Recently, she adds, a friend’s fiancé “thanked me the next three times I saw him” for telling him about the cheaper lab-made option.

Man-made diamonds are catching on, despite some lingering stigma. This year was the first time that sales of lab-made and natural mined loose diamonds, primarily used as center stones in engagement rings, were split evenly, according to data from Tenoris, a jewellery and diamond trend-analytics company.

The rise of lab-made stones, however, is bringing up quirks alongside the perks. Now that blingier engagement rings—above two or three carats—are more affordable, more people are dealing with the peculiarities of wearing rather large rocks.

An engagement ring made with a lab-grown diamond at Ada Diamonds in New York City. PHOTO: CAM POLLACK/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Esther Hare, a 5-foot-11-inch former triathlete, sought out a 4.5-carat lab-made oval-shaped diamond to fit her larger hands as a part of her vow renewal in Hawaii last year. It was a far cry from the half-carat ring her husband proposed with more than 25 years ago and the 1.5-carat upgrade they purchased 10 years ago. Hare, 50, who lives in San Jose, Calif., and works in high tech, chose a $40,000 lab-made diamond because “it’s nuts” to have to spend $100,000 on a natural stone. “It had to be big—that was my vision,” she says.

But the size of the ring has made it less practical at times. She doesn’t wear it for athletic training and swaps in her wedding band instead. And she is careful to leave it at home when traveling. “A lot of times I won’t take it on vacation because it’s just a monster,” she says.

The average retail price for a one-carat lab-made loose diamond decreased to $1,426 this year from $3,039 in 2020, according to the Tenoris data. Similar-sized loose natural diamonds cost $5,426 this year, compared with $4,943 in 2020.

Lab-made diamonds have essentially the same chemical makeup as natural ones, and look the same, unless viewed through sophisticated equipment that gauges the characteristics of emitted light.

At Ritani, an online jewellery retailer, lab-made diamond sales make up about 70% of the diamonds sold, up from roughly 30% two years ago, says Juliet Gomes, head of customer service at the company, based in White Plains, N.Y.

Ritani sometimes records videos of the lab-diamonds pinging when exposed to a “diamond tester,” a tool that judges authenticity, to show customers that the man-made rocks behave the same as natural ones. “We definitely have some deep conversations with them,” Gomes says.

Not all gem dealers are rolling with these stones.

Philadelphia jeweller Steven Singer only stocks the natural stuff in his store and is planning a February campaign to give about 1,000 one-carat lab-made diamonds away free to prove they are “worthless.” Anyone can sign up online and get one in the mail; even shipping is free. “I’m not selling Frankensteins that were built in a lab,” Singer says.

Some brides are turned off by the larger bling now allowed by the lower prices.When her now-husband proposed with a two-carat lab-grown engagement ring, Tiffany Buchert, 40, was excited about the prospect of marriage—but not about the size of the diamond, which she says struck her as “costume jewellery-ish.”

“I said yes in the moment, of course, I didn’t want it to be weird,” says the physician assistant from West Chester, Pa.

But within weeks, she says, she fessed up, telling her fiancé: “I think I hate this ring.”

The couple returned it and then bought a one-carat natural diamond for more than double the price.

Couples find that lab-grown diamonds have made it more affordable to get engaged. PHOTO: CAM POLLACK/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

When Boulet, the wedding planner in Raleigh, got engaged herself, she was over the moon when her fiancé proposed with a 2.3 carat lab-made diamond ring. “It’s very shiny, we were almost worried it was too shiny and was going to look fake,” she says.

It doesn’t, which presents another issue—looking like someone who really shelled out for jewellery. Boulet will occasionally volunteer that her diamond ring came from a lab.

“I don’t want people to think I’m putting on airs, or trying to be flashier than I am,” she says.

For Daniel Teoh, a 36-year-old software engineer outside of Detroit, buying a cheaper lab-made diamond for his fiancée meant extra room in his $30,000 ring budget.

Instead of a bigger ring, he got her something they could both enjoy. During a walk while on an annual ski trip to South Lake Tahoe, Calif., Teoh popped the question and handed his now-wife a handmade wooden box that included a 2.5-carat lab-made diamond ring—and a car key.

She put on the ring, celebrated with both of their sisters and a friend, who was the unofficial photographer of the happy event, and then they drove back to the house. There, she saw a 1965 Mustang GT coupe in Wimbledon white with red stripes and a bow on top.

Looking back, Teoh says, it was still the diamond that made the big first impression.

“It wasn’t until like 15 minutes later she was like ‘so, what’s with this key?’” he adds.

Impact Investing’s Next Challenge

There’s now another major hurdle to the mainstreaming of impact investing.

Couples find that lab-grown diamonds make it cheaper to get engaged or upgrade to a bigger ring. But there are rocky moments.