Redefining a good investment: Faithinvest announced

PRESS RELEASE: Redefining a good investment: new organisation FaithInvest will bring religious investors together and push impact investment to a new level

ZUG, SWITZERLAND, September 17, 2018. A new organisation was announced today, bringing together some of the largest religious investors representing trillions of dollars.

It might change the world. It will certainly redefine the meaning of a “good investment”.

FaithInvest, which will come into being in March 2019, and work around the world will be a network and platform for identifying and creating investment opportunities aligned with values held by faith groups, that include fighting injustice, addressing climate change and restoring a more beautiful world.

	The meeting is at the stunning Lassalle-Haus Jesuit meeting centre above Zug

Which doesn’t mean they won’t make substantial financial returns. It means there’ll be extra criteria for what constitutes a substantial return, and those criteria will benefit more people, and the planet itself., as well as investors and the companies themselves.

The platform will initially concentrate on investments that further the 17 Sustainable Development Goals – a vision, of a world without poverty, with equality, and with a clean environment – launched by the United Nations in 2015.

FaithInvest will also provide education and information about these value-driven investments and it will be a voice for this movement in religious outreach, the media, finance worlds, parliaments, boardrooms, schools, universities and elsewhere – so the principles will be understood and taken up across a wider group.

“The message is: if you have a pension or savings, however small, you are more powerful than you ever thought,” said FaithInvest’s interim CEO, Michael Even.

“Every investment has an impact,” said Amy Clarke of Tribe Impact Capital, who is one of the development committee members.” This is about giving more investors more choice about what kind of impact their money will make. FaithInvest helps the ones who want it to be a positive one.”

“This is the moment when collectively, the faiths move from just saying what they won’t support to deciding what they will invest in, positively, to align their investments with the good that they do. It also makes sense financially,” said chair, Martin Palmer.

FaithInvest will also help projects around the world move from being grant-funded to becoming income-generating and self-sustaining businesses, embodying the new importance given to entrepreneurship and investment as key partners in funding a better world. This aspect of the programme is being developed in partnership with UNDP and the Scottish government.

FaithInvest has been formed by major religious investors working with philanthropies, the United Nations, national governments and financial companies specialising in impact investment. It is being hosted for its first few months by the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC), a UK-based international NGO started by HRH Prince Philip in 1995.

It will be a legal entity by December 2018, based in Europe.

Until March 2019 the interim CEO will be Michael Even, former CEO (then chair) of investment group MAN Numeric and the non-executive chair will be Martin Palmer, also secretary-general of ARC. Both are taking on the role of bringing this organisation into being. A permanent CEO and a full-time team will be appointed in 2019.

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