How we invest today shapes our future. The financial system is powerful, and our view is that it has to serve the world better. At Snowball, we place equal importance on creating positive impact and positive financial returns in every investment we make. We believe this represents a better way to invest. On this page you can read a series of reports about our approach and our commitment to transparent continual improvement. Together we can create a shift in the way the investment industry acts.
We invited The Good Economy to hold us to account. They carried out an independent verification of our impact approach to see if we are living up to our ambitions. This report is what they found.
We want to hold ourselves - and the investment industry - to account.
In our latest report, The Good Economy highlight where we lead the market in integrating positive returns with positive change, and where we need to improve. We don't know of any other asset manager who has made this level of information public before.
Our goal in publishing this report is to hold ourselves accountable for the continual improvement we want to make. It is also a challenge to all asset managers to undertake a similar independent verification, and ultimately share a more transparent view of their own impact practice. If you are an investor who wants to mitigate the risk of ‘impact washing’, you can use the themes in this report as a framework to ask your managers for a clearer view of the impact of your investments.
“With growing concerns about impact washing, having the quality of impact management processes independently verified can go a long way to demonstrating the authenticity of an impact approach. Our verification found Snowball outperforms its peers on almost every aspect of impact practice but what matters most is their willingness to take action on our findings, to be open and reflective about feedback and be part of changing behaviours in investment.”
“Snowball is a leader not only in the rigor of its impact management practice, but also in the openness with which it shares candid insights with other investors to advance impact management for the field as a whole.”
“We believe better data and transparency in impact standards are imperative for mobilizing greater capital for impact. We applaud Snowball for seeking an independent audit on their impact approach and especially for the transparency they have modeled in publishing their results, including both strengths and areas for improvement. We hope to see more impact managers embrace a robust approach to impact verification and share their results in order to drive impact integrity and accountability.”
Impact verification is designed to help investors to reflect on and refine their impact management systems, based the latest best practice in investment. Our latest report - the third and final in the series - contains the findings of an independent assessment of our approach optimising our portfolio for impact, risk and return.
We invest in fund managers dedicated to achieving impact. These managers are acting on our behalf – and yours – and are creating a shift in the way the investment industry acts. In this report, we share our analysis of responses to a survey we sent to our managers and you can see more of how our framework operates.
We worked on this report with The Impact Management Project who work to build global consensus on how to measure and manage impact. We analysed the impact of the ventures and enterprises that our managers are invested in.
