Impact Investment Group CEO Daniel Madhavan says financial returns and social impact must work hand in hand. “Some investors are looking for impact first, and the financial considerations for them are definitely secondary,” Madhavan says. “You have other investors who are still very finance-first driven but would like to have some impact. We are looking very specifically for businesses where the impact and the financial performance of the business are inextricably linked. It means that through the business model itself, they only financially succeed when they're driving impact, and they're only driving impact when they financially succeed.”
Simon O’Connor, CEO of the Responsible Investment Association of Australasia, reports Australian impact investment growth mirrors global trends. “We’ve had a quadrupling of funds flowing into impact investing in the past two-and-a-half years in Australia,” he says. “The total quantity of impact investment at the end of 2017 was $5.8 billion.”