The Global Impact Investing Ratings System
Driving Capital to Impact
The impact investing industry is facilitating investments that are not only socially responsible, but which also actively create positive social and environmental impact. In order to scale the impact investing marketplace, investors require an independent third-party impact ratings product that is comparable, transparent, and easy to use. Learn more about impact investing.
A key impediment to new capital flowing into the impact investing marketplace continues to be a lack of easy to use tools to assess, benchmark, and report impact. Most impact investors lack the expertise, staffing, data, and technology to build their own approach to judging impact, so they remain on the sidelines for lack of ability to compare investment opportunities across markets, industries, and impact areas using comparable, transparent, and independently verified tools. For this reason, many players in the impact investing space have expressed a desire to see a ratings and analytics platform that can facilitate the flow of capital and provide leadership on judging impact performance as a public good.
Why is GIIRS well-suited to solve this problem?
GIIRS (pronounced "gears," stands for Global Impact Investing Rating System) is a comprehensive and transparent system for assessing the social and environmental impact of developed and emerging market companies and funds with a ratings and analytics approach analogous to Morningstar investment rankings and Capital IQ financial analytics.
GIIRS is uniquely positioned in the impact investing marketplace because GIIRS is the only entity that has: a focus on the impact performance of private companies; that uses a cross-industry and cross-geographic methodology; and that provides transparent, independent, and verified data. GIIRS is a hybrid private/public good in that while it charges for its services in order to become sustainable, it is a non-profit entity that publishes data for public use and educates/advocates about impact investing and impact metrics, and it maintains transparent standards and an assessment tool that can be used by anyone for internal use for free.
What will change when GIIRS has scaled?
When GIIRS has scaled, GIIRS will be a normal part of the investment process for companies, funds and investors for impact investments globally and as a result there will be an:
- Increase in the amount of $ invested in impact investments
- Increase in the efficiency of the due diligence, investment, and reporting process for impact investments
- Measurable improvements in the impact of rated companies and funds as they seek to improve their GIIRS ratings
- Increase in capital invested in high impact, impact investing opportunities
- A better understanding of the field of impact investing, as GIIRS publishes data on aggregate market impact performance and provides education to investors on how to utilize the impact data collected through GIIRS
