Financial technology provider BlackRock has launched a high-conviction active equity impact strategy called the BlackRock Global Impact Fund.
The fund gives investors the opportunity to direct their investments toward companies helping to address major world challenges.
Companies will receive funding that are contributing to the advancement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including increasing access to education, affordable housing, healthcare innovation, digital inclusion, preventing climate change and increasing efficiencies in water use.
The fund is managed through BlackRock’s Active Equities Impact Investing team, which recently formed under the leadership of Eric Rice, who joined the firm in October 2019.
Rice will draw on his 30 years of industry experience, most recently exclusively developing and managing impact strategies, and including his prior experience working for the World Bank as a development economist and as a US diplomat in Rwanda.
The fund forms part of BlackRock’s Sustainable Investing platform, which manages $107-billion in dedicated sustainable strategies.
Alongside the impact goals of the fund, it also seeks to maximise long-term total returns.
The fund management team has set stringent impact criteria for the portfolio companies including materiality – whereby a majority of revenues or business activity advances one or more of the SDGs; additionality − defined as delivering a new technology or innovation to market, serving an underserved population; and measurability, in that the impact must be quantifiable.
Rice says impact investing is becoming more attractive as investors increasingly target advancing sustainability objectives.
“Launching the fund during the Covid-19 pandemic has further highlighted the important role companies play in society. Capital from the fund will [for the moment] be put toward companies focused on medical diagnostic tools and vaccines to combat the crisis, as well as crisis mass notification systems and microloans,” he explains.
The fund is dollar-denominated and available for investors across Europe.