 Some of you may not be aware the Rugby World Cup is going on right now. Go the Orblacks. And a scrum is eight people in a rugby team. So this is a true scrum, we're living up to the name. But welcome. It's a thrill to be here and I'm really energized by what we're talking about today, which is all the progress that's been made in the last year on the process of measuring and optimizing for the impact in impact investing. And also this fast growing development of a more broad base commitment to accountability for impact. We have an incredible breadth of perspectives to share and not a lot of time, so please do look out for a blog that we'll follow in a couple of weeks, where we will summarize for you some of the systems we've discussed as well as some others in the market you would have seen in just the last couple of days in Impact Out for just great announcements from Eris and PCV and others that are doing great work in this field, so look out for that. But the object today is to really attack the doubts and fears we have about impact measurement and management head on. When we think about impact measurement, we often think it's expensive or esoteric or secretive or elitist or difficult to do, it's unaccessible. And there's been so much that's happened in the last year to hit those challenges head on. And so we have a group here of four product providers and standard setters, pioneers in the market that have done some great work in the last year they're going to share with us. And then a group of practitioners who will help share with us the way they're using the new tools that have now become available. So just to go down the list here, we have Letitia from Iris, Diane from the IFC, Elizabeth from UNDP, Sasha from 60 decibels, Adam from Partners Group, Kate from Apaya, Lauren from Jordan Park and Andrew from UBS. So I'm going to begin with the four panelists nearest to me who I'm calling the kind of pioneers panel and just ask them to share with you what they've done in the last year to make your lives truly easier to enhance integrity and what you're doing vis-à-vis impact to share with you what they've done to really enhance our practice of impact management. So Letitia. Hi, everybody. So it is a really exciting time in impact investing. We're seeing at the gym, we're seeing this market grow and grow rapidly. We launched earlier this year our first market sizing report, which estimates the size of impact investing at half a trillion dollars. And so at the gym, we're focused on helping the market scale, but scale with integrity. And at the core of that is making sure that high quality, rigorous IMM practice is the norm for all investors. So in May of this year, we launched Iris Plus, which is an evolution from the Iris catalog of metrics that the gym has managed over the last 10 years. And it's a system that helps investors translate their intentions into results. And it does so by providing a clear pathway that helps you frame your goals in a common way, either by SDG or by impact themes such as financial inclusion or affordable housing. It gives you the evidence base so that you don't have to do that homework on your own and you can make decisions based on evidence. And it also gives you the key metrics that matter, which we call core metric sets. And it's all done in one very easy to navigate system, which by the way is a public good and it's free and easy to use by anybody. Great. Thank you, Leticia. Diane, last year we were here talking about in anticipation the work that the IFC was about to share with us. And in April, the principles were launched. I would love to hear from you about IFC's contribution. Well, there was a recognition among impact investors for the need for greater transparency and discipline in the impact investing market. So early in 2018, IFC led the initiative to develop a set of principles that lay out the framework, so the systems and processes needed to incorporate impact at every stage of the investment. And the three major components were intentionality, contribution and measurement and the intentionality from the outside of the investment and contribution, why your capital matters and then the ability to measure the impact. So we launched as Ben said earlier this year and we now count 77 signatories from their private and public sector asset owners, asset managers representing 26 countries and about 300 billion in impact assets under management. So it continues to grow. The signatories are incredibly enthusiastic about sharing best practices. It's not a competitive network of signatories, which is great. And they really want to maintain a very rigorous standard for the requirements to be an impact investor. Thank you, Diane. Elizabeth, UNDP too has been hard at work in the last 18 months. We'd love an update from you on. So UNDP is really the global network of the UN system and the custodian of the Sustainable Development Goals. And in its stewardship of the Sustainable Development Goals, it's really has a unique role and responsibility in the UN system to really help define what is SDG enabling investment. So SDG impact, what I've been leading for the last year is really working to eliminate some of those key barriers and to drive more integrity for what SDG enabling investment is. And we have been hard at work over the last year developing some tools. We've put forward practice standards. We're working across asset classes to really help inform and encourage what SDG enabling investment. And the practice standards for equity were released early September. They're out for public consultation. We'll be coming forward with standards for bond issuance and for enterprises in November and December. We've also developed a new methodology that really helps to translate the data that's collected across the UN system to make it more investor facing. So this methodology really takes the development need, the policy and political priorities and then the investment interest in activity to create investment opportunity areas. We've tested this in Brazil and we're working across six different geographies to prototype this approach so that we can scale in a big way in 2020. And Elizabeth, just to put a pin in it. So the SDG impact standards are out for consultation right now. Where would people go to find them? So the standards are out for public consultation. The equity standards were released early September. They'll be open for public consultation. SDG impact at UNDP dot org on our website. You can also reach me. And we'll be releasing the new standards for bond issuance. We'll come forward in November and they'll be out for a couple of months and then enterprises will follow last in December and they'll also be available for public consultation. I should say that the standards will be backed by an SDG impact seal for UNDP, which I can talk about actually as we move on. Thanks, Elizabeth. Sasha, you've had a busy year too. We've had a busy year. Yeah, so this year we spun out a new company called 60 decibels. We were part of Acumen and we built our lean data methodology within Acumen. Our experience at Acumen as an impact investor was that we had a well-developed system for gathering data and really poor data. And our conclusion was that ultimately impact is around a lived experience of a customer. But if you're an entrepreneur trying to serve that customer, you had no easy way to actually understand what that lived experience was. And so we are not a framework and we are not a way for organizing data. We want to make it easy to listen to the people who matter most, customers and beneficiaries. And so we've built an approach and a methodology, but more importantly an infrastructure that allows that to happen. So we have our own team of about 35 people, but we have 155 researchers in 34 countries. And their job is to talk to end customers and ask them, are they experiencing better livelihoods, more safety, more comfort in the home and the like. And what we have found is, and I guess I would say our core belief is, unless we can find a way to make the active measuring impact feel more like customer insights and customer intelligence, which is fast and nimble and agile and is first and foremost adding value to the people who are trying to serve customers, it will feel forever like a compliance exercise that is a tax on a social business rather than a value add to that social business. So we're really trying to lodge ourselves there in value addition between customers and companies or customers and NGOs with the belief and the experience that we can get really rich data that will then flow into an IFC principles or flow into really any of the frameworks that are out there. But we're trying to be very much bottoms up and create higher quality, more value added data that will supplement kind of all the great work that's getting done. Great. Thank you, Sasha. So now we'll turn our attention to the folks who are using all these wonderful tools that are being created. And Adam, you're one of them at Partners Group. You've launched an impact fund and you've had to go through the process of creating your impact management system and are now implementing that. So we'd just love to hear your reactions on whether, if our hypothesis is this will help investors, whether it's truly helping investors. Yeah, there's no question it's helping. And just to give a sense about quick background, my own sensibilities with impact come from the development aid industry. I spent 10 years doing USAID and DFID projects where we had teams of 10 to 12 people monitoring the valuation who were on site doing household level surveys. I now find myself in a situation where we are a private markets investor. We're not going to have a 12 person team doing household level surveys. And so the principles guiding us when we launched PG Life were, how do we find frameworks that are simple enough to use but credible? And robust, how do we find that very fine balance? And when we cast around the market, we found the impact management project as the first way that said, hey, we can analyze individual investments in a very simple and powerful way with these five dimensions that help for the investment level. Then we needed something for the fund level. And thank you, Diane and IFC for the operating principles. Now we understand the basic requirements, what it means to be an impact investing manager, including number five, which is you should also be talking about the negative impacts of your investments and things like that. It's not just all good stories. So that's been our experience to date, finding things that are easy to use but credible and robust. And where we are today is that we see such great energy behind more and more frameworks, but we have to always make that decision incrementally. Is an additional certification framework something that helps our investment platform make better impact and manage that better? Or are we getting towards a proliferation of frameworks where it's actually too unwieldy? Right, thank you, Adam. Kate, you invest in sort of smaller enterprises and entrepreneurs generally, I think bring that perspective that we badly need here, sort of to understand whether what we're talking about is so much easier for, let's say, a partners group than it is for an entrepreneur on the ground working day in and day out to have impact in their market. So how do we, will this be helpful to them too, these kind of frameworks, or do you anticipate a tweaking or some adjustment that's needed? Theoretically, this is all extremely helpful, it's growing the field, it's making things with more integrity. But frameworks and standards are really crucial to us as an industry and as a field. To an entrepreneur and really echoing Sasha's point, they need metrics that help guide management decision making. And my organization, we invest with the theory of change that if we invest in companies that will create jobs for the ultra poor, that we will be able to find a cost effective, efficient way to move families out of extreme poverty. So for me and all of the companies we invest in who share that same mission, we are basically trying to say, okay, are you moving out of extreme poverty? It's a very simple question that we ask ourselves all the time. And that rolls up to standards, but the standards aren't real in terms of our decision making on an ongoing basis. They help me talk to people at conferences like this and just to make this really concrete. And I'm gonna hearken to the gin because we love the gin and we're good friends with them and so hopefully they won't be mad at me. You know, there's a standard in the gin about income change, which is what we are after. And the standard is income change can either be an increase, a decrease, or stay the same, which is indeed the universe of options for what can happen. For us, if a company is employing someone in almost all cases, but not always, household income's gonna go up. But our entrepreneurs and we really care what the quantum is. You know, I want to answer the question, should we be doubling down in crafts aggregators in India or is actually agribusiness going to be a better bet for us? And our entrepreneurs want to know if this foray into this new product is actually generating more livelihoods that are meaningful. So the top sound is totally necessary for the entrepreneur. We need a little more effort to get the bottom up. Right, thank you. Thank you, Kay. Lauren, you're dealing with a number of Honeyworth investors at Jordan Park who I imagine would be confused if they were sitting in the audience listening to this and there's a lot of acronyms and terms that they wouldn't understand and there's a process that feels very technical to them. So how do you take all this and translate it to your clients and what's the balance between just giving them what they want and pushing them to even think more broadly about impact themselves? Thanks, Ben. It's absolutely right. I've been personally inspired and impressed by the evolution of this topic and the tools available as it relates to IMM. Truly, we have clients that are very much asking about measurement management reporting impact at a very high level and that looks very different as it relates to depth and breadth and quantitative versus qualitative but everything we're talking about is still inside baseball. Most people and certainly the clients that we're working with are not doing this day in and day out. So the responsibility on industry practitioners to actually leverage all of these frameworks and principles for their unique needs. So at Jordan Park we've been going through a very extensive proprietary design process to really leverage the power in the modularity I would say of everything that is available here and so any practitioner where they are a foundation, a single family office and asset manager, an RIA, your needs are gonna look very different and so what I would say is from our perspective we're really excited because the IFC principles, they signal something really powerful in terms of integrity and guidance and having that as a broader organizing principle among the industry. IMP, huge fan as Ben knows, gone way back in the trenches but really excited about that framework especially as it relates to mapping across the clients portfolio, liquid, public, private and philanthropic assets. Iris certainly picking and choosing what metrics are gonna make sense there. I'm excited about the day when we can use 60 decibels to go really deep on any client portfolios but the reality is this is gonna look very different depending on what the practitioner's needs are. Right, thanks Lauren. And Andrew you're sifting through the investable universe and impact looking at the ways some managers do this with funds and others and comparing and contrasting. What's your read on what is current best practice? Where are you seeing opportunities for folks that are a little better where people are already doing a good job and what are your hopes for where your underlying investments will progress in their practice of impact management? Yeah, thanks Ben. I mean I'd echo a lot of the points that Lauren made. I think we face a very similar end set of clients and customers. What we aim to do at UBS is have a shelf or an offering set that includes options for everybody ranging from discretionary solutions all the way through to advisory options but impact or sustainability it means different things to different people, right? And so we need to have that breadth and depth. I think what we are trying to do is maintain the integrity of the options that go on the platform and as such the emergence of the tool sets and the frameworks. Iris Plus, IFC we're a founding signatory of. I think it really helps us in regard to that maintaining that integrity and also working with a set of external managers to say, look, here is best practice. Sometimes people will come to us and say, you know, I don't quite know how to fit this into my existing frameworks. Where do I go? And so we can point them to a set of, I think there's been convergence around these frameworks and tool sets. And I think that's really in advance to the conversation Lauren and I were talking about like a couple of years ago. This was not the conversation. So now I think we are there. You asked about a few things where I think people are falling short even though the process and frameworks are starting to get there. I think the management of impact is still not quite there yet, right? I think people are measuring but incorporating that into an active process where you are really managing against objectives or managing against target KPIs. I don't think we're quite there yet. I think there's a desire to do that but I don't think we're quite there yet. The second thing I'd probably call out is Sasha talked about kind of voice of the beneficiary and really thinking about that being the types of things that we should measure. Are we making sure that that end impact is there and not just as investors saying this is what we think is right to measure. I think that there's still a lot of work to be done on that front. And then the exit piece is probably the other piece. And as investors I don't think that we are the partners that we work with necessarily do it in a way that's more than just considering impact upon exit. So I think there's some work to be done there. But I do think that all of the tool sets, all of the frameworks, we are in a much better place and it's pretty exciting to see all of the convergence. Like Lauren said, I don't think we're in a place where many of our end investors necessarily want to see or talk about a lot of that. But it goes to us in our seats saying what do we think needs to be done in order to deliver the right experience to the end customer or investor. Thanks Andrew. Satra, I'd like to come back to you. I mean the growth of 60 decibels is tied directly to the value that your customers see in the product that you're providing. I mean how has that perception changed? How are you communicating your value proposition to your users? And is that becoming an easier thing to communicate and something they more readily understand? I mean, I think it is, I think the folks that are seeking us out are people who have been sitting with this challenge for a long time and kind of found their way to the end of the road of what the best form of strategy and organizing of data can get them, which is something. But it's also sort of a frustration that it doesn't allow for learning and improvement. It allows for kind of clarity of intention. And so I think we are lucky to have kind of demanding customers who are looking for that next level and who are people who are saying, ultimately, we talk about impact management, I would actually like us to get to impact performance. And the notion, I mean we took as a, I mean just taking a big step back, we took as a sector so long to agree that intention was a qualification. So we achieved that. But the gap between intention and performance is experienced by a customer. And when we have good intentions and bad performance, it's not on us, usually, frankly, as asset, I'm not an asset manager, but for the asset managers. But it is for the person whose job was not better, the person whose family does not get better off. And I think that the people that we're working with, I would say it's actually internally generated by them. So as long as we can deliver, the communication piece is quite easy because what they're saying is they're experiencing a frustration because there is a gap. And what I would encourage us as a sector is we have this balancing act of continually welcoming in new people and trying not to scare them off with so many things that they have to do all at once. And I think that happens by recognizing that anything we're trying to do, good or bad performance is not a one-time moment. And so we can begin to talk about good or bad impact performance without saying, and if you don't achieve good on day one, you have failed. And so there's just this normative piece that I think we need to be careful about. But I also worry a lot about us being so proud about how far we've come and not recognizing that fundamentally if we don't get this right, then we're just, what we're doing is deploying a lot of capital and potentially not making a lot of change. Thank you, Sasha. Let's share, I'm Iris's biggest fan as you know, and at the conference, the GIN conference in Amsterdam a few weeks ago, I went through my top 10 list of things I love about Iris. And one of them was that you guys are so modest in the way you talk about Iris and the fact that people should use it, it's free and it's helpful. I mean, Iris is essential. I mean, I made the point that if you're not using Iris, you're not an impact investor. I mean, just straight up. And so how do you help investors and entrepreneurs to help themselves? Like how do you, you know, given your modesty, you may not answer this question. But how do you communicate to the market that this is like baseline stuff and we're here to help you understand that and become better impact investors? That's a great question. So I mean, it is a very exciting time in the market. The market is growing. We do see convergence as well, but then echoing what I think Andrew said, we still do see a lot of investors struggling with having really high quality IMM and specifically when it comes to data being clear, being comparable and being consistent. And so that's why Iris Plus is built as a very easy system that has this pathway that helps investors go, okay, let's go from setting your objectives to checking your evidence base so that you can check your theory of change to just giving you the metrics that matter. So we're doing the homework for you so that there's no more excuse. We have the evidence base, we have the key metrics that matter so that then you have the information in your finger tips so that the end of the day we can do exactly what Andrew was saying is we want investors to be using that data to inform decision making. We can continue to use stories or guess works when it comes to impact. We really need to be using impact data to make decisions. So we built the pathway. It's very easy, it's there. We just need to make sure that people are using the data. With Andrew, you made the point that there's an emerging consensus around impact now and I wonder whether that consensus includes accountability and verification and certification. I mean that feels like it's an emerging part of the conversation but perhaps that's becoming part of the consensus faster than we realize. And so Diane Elizabeth, I wanted to give you the opportunity to reflect on that and both of your systems are anchored in the concept of verifiability. How's that being received by the market happily or with resistance, with skepticism, people happily about pushing back on it? We'd love to just get a sense of what you're hearing in the market. Now there's absolutely not skepticism. In fact, principle nine is of the nine impact principles. They, it requires independent verification on a periodic basis that you in fact do what you say you do. So each signatory has to provide an annual disclosure statement in which they describe how they align with each of the principles. And that's all well and good but it was so, when we had an external sounding board when we were developing the principles and principle nine was a critical piece. Everybody said, if we don't have independent verification then everybody will have impact dilution, impact washing, everyone can say they're an impact investor but there's no proof. So principle nine was actually embraced by impact investors and the asset owners and asset managers that participated in the development of the principles. That being said, it's not necessarily the easiest thing to do and we drafted the principles so that it was, these are applicable no matter what size of your fund. So it doesn't have to be a third-party external verifier which may be beyond the resources of the particular impact investor but it hasn't been done before and all the signatories are right now discussing amongst themselves. We're having all these different conference calls about how are you doing it and what's the best way to do it and I think it's gonna be a process. So for the next few years there will be probably more convergence about what does a disclosure statement look like and how should we verify if you're, and the verification is of your processes and systems that prove that you align with the principles but it's a process that we're in the beginning of this and it will probably be three to five years from now and we'll all probably agree better on what it should look like. Elizabeth, do you wanna add anything in 30 seconds or less? Just how people are receiving SDG impact in the market? No, it's been, I think we've seen a super positive response to this need for what is authenticity. I think a lot of investors, particularly in the SDG kind of lexicon are trying to understand how do we really contribute to the sustainable development goals and so the practice standards that we've come forward with have been super well received and that I think investors are very happy to have very specific guidance for really how to implement some of the principles on the market including the IFC principles but also the principles for responsible investing and some of the Gen characteristics, some of the UNEPFIs. So I think there's genuine interest in real guidance on how to contribute to the SDGs, what is authentic, how do you drive more integrity and I think when it comes to the 50 or so funds right now that we have piloting the equity standards, the real interest is how do we contribute in a consistent, comparable and transparent manner so that we can all sort of demonstrate that we're doing this in one way so that we know that we actually are contributing to the goals and that is measurable and transparent. So I think that's what a key interest is that need for transparency in the practice. Right, thanks Elizabeth. We're almost out of time. Five words or less, or 10 words or less. Depends how quickly you talk. A final thought for how do we approach this as practitioners and really made the most out of all this great work that's happened in the last year. Down the line, Adam, why don't you start. Needs to speak to the business itself, needs to inform the business, can't be a reporting exercise, has to be something that enriches or makes the business a better, stronger business. Thanks, Kate. Know the change that you're trying to see, pick the right metrics and track them. This is where the industry is headed. If your stakeholders aren't asking about it now, they're behind the curve, so get ahead of it. Pick what you're trying to solve for, test something and iterate. It's gonna be a continuous process. Andrew, final word. Focus on the outcomes. I think people have different ways of measuring the impact and managing the impact, but let's have the differentiation be about how effective you are at delivering outcomes as opposed to your process for approaching measurement and management. Thanks, please join me in thanking fantastic panelists. Well, of course.