 All right, well, I need to get started without our fourth panelist. Oh, me, but I think we're going to have to do that. And hopefully he'll work out the glitches and join in a few minutes. If not, maybe we can bring him into the conversation through the chat. So I, I just like to say hello and welcome everyone to our panel building trust in the impact label. I'm so excited to be joined today by, well, three of four individuals. So far, hopefully a forthcoming soon real experts in the field of impact investing and stakeholder capitalism. I'll be very brief in the introductions to make sure we leave as much time as possible for the conversation. But first, Elizabeth Boggs Davidson. Who is director of SDG impact and exciting new initiatives. She's going to tell us about of the United Nations development program. Focused on mobilizing private sector capital to help achieve the SDGs. Bart Hula hand co-founder of the lab, which needs really no introduction, but most know is dedicated to using the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. Andrew Lee, head of sustainable and impact investing at UBS where he supports clients who seek to incorporate impact and sustainability into their investments and manages 20 odd trillion dollar portfolio. I'll also introduce Omid Saith, head of the impact investing initiative at Prudential financial. One billion dollar portfolio and is in charge of all underwriting and portfolio management. So each of you comes at this topic from a quite a unique perspective of how to build trust in the impact label. I think we can all agree that the B court movement helped really redefine the purpose of business as we think about it today. And now the impact investing industry is working a more clearly defined impact in the process with with new standards, new policies and new tools. The firm I lead blue mark is is also engaged in this work of building trust in the impact label a few weeks ago. My colleagues and I at tide line formally launched blue mark to provide impact their patient services in response to a market. Looks like we lost Christina. Oh my gosh. Come back. Let's give, let's give her a minute and to see if she comes right back. If not, we will add limit to carry on. We will carry on. Let's give her a minute just to see if she comes back. She is our moderator for the second. Thanks for your patience. Nothing like technology. Maybe give him one more minute. I'll wait. I'm so sorry. My gosh. This is a first. Well, I am not quite sure where I was lost. I was just giving a brief plug for blue mark. The new firm launched by tide line to provide independent impact verification services. Obviously. Very court of this mission of establishing trust in the impact label. I would just like to say as well that for people who want to learn more about verification blue mark. Our website blue mark tide line. Dot com is is is open, but also we'll be having a booth. We'll, we'll man our booth. That's so cap virtually after this panel. So please join us for to continue the discussion. But the industry still has a very long way to go to tackle the threat of impact washing. And the risk of impact drift. And that's what we're going to be discussing today on this panel. So with no further ado. I'd like to kick off really with Elizabeth and Elizabeth, you've been doing some really exciting work at SDG at UNDP launching SDG impact. Would love if you could share with, with all of us. Why the market needs SDG impact standard. To help align it business and investment decisions with, with the sustainable development goals. I'm happy to thank you Christina. It's nice to be here. So SDG impact is a global UNDP initiative and it's really aimed at catalyzing investments to achieve the SDGs. Transparency and accountability and SDG investing was our real goal when we launched this initiative on the margins of the UN General Assembly in late 2018. How do you drive more accountability for claims that your investments are SDG enabling. So we've been developing SDG impact standards for bond issuers for fund managers and enterprises. All to drive more positive investment and activity. To where it's needed to support delivery of the SDGs. By 2030. So UNDP is the development network of the UN system. It operates in 170 countries and it works across all sectors, all sustainable development goals. It's also the integrator of the sustainable development goals for the UN system. Which means that. It has a really unique responsibility and role in defining what SDG enabling investment is and needs to achieve. So UNDP entered this space because there were no guidelines and really no way to measure and create integrity around claims that investments were advancing the sustainable development goals. And without clear standards for what SDGs are doing. So we know that much of the activity labeled SDG enabling has not yet translated to greater investment activity. Or capital being directed effectively to, to the achievement of the goals. And it's been super hard to differentiate who's using the SDGs as a reporting. And it's been really difficult to do that. And it's been really difficult to do that. And it's been super hard to differentiate who's using the SDGs as a reporting lens or really a tagging exercise. And who's really using the goals to catalyze investment and contribute to their achievement. So over the last 18 months, we've been in the process working to develop standards that's really brought together the most developed practice and impact management into what we think is very actionable guidance for private investment funds for bond issuers and for companies that want to contribute positively to the goals. Business and investors are genuinely looking for this guidance. We did a lot of survey work with Tideline back in 2018 to establish that businesses are needing guidance to help translate their intent to action. So the standards have been designed really with that need in mind. The standards are really a set of practices around strategy, around management, transparency and governance. They provide a common language and a best really best practice guidance for integrating impact management into business and investment practices and decision making. So these are practice standards. They are not performance standards. They focus on the internal management and the decision making practices very much in line with achieving the SDGs. So for us, they are a benchmark for best practice and we're finding that, you know, SDG bond issuers or PE fund managers and companies can use the standards to really map their internal impact management systems, identify where there really gaps in their systems, check and sort of rectify marketing of SDG claims, design and model future initiatives and determine readiness for certification. Investors are using the standards to really frame investment guidelines and diligence questions and to seek greater standardization of practice and assurance of products that are making these SDG claims. So the standards are an open source. They're public good. They're competitively neutral. It's the platform that practitioners and analysts and assurers can apply. What we're doing now, the standards will be supplemented with a voluntary assurance framework that will include an SDG impact seal, which we want to make available to recognize best practice and the accreditation process and the training curriculum for assurers is being developed in tandem with consultations on the standards. So the SDG impact standards for private equity funds were launched officially on the 6th of October. They reflect two rounds of global public consultation with over 4,000 participants. A working group of about 30 private equity funds was organized in September and started working together with our team to implement to apply the standards in their funds. And really the purpose of this is really to inform our guidance packages and to inform our assurance process. The first draft of the standards for enterprises has just been released on the 15th of October for a two month consultation period. And the SDG impact standards for bonds will undergo its final round of public consultation in November so that we expect to have final drafts of the bond and the enterprise standards available early in 2021 and we'll start piloting the assurance in early 2021. So I think that's enough for right now. Can you hear Christina? No. Christina, we can't hear you. Sorry, can you hear me now? Yes. I wanted to welcome you. First of all, to thank you, Elizabeth, for those comments. You've been extremely busy at UNDP and to welcome me to the panel. We maintain faith and introduced you as part of our expert panelist. So thank you for being here, Omid. And we'll get back to some of the points you raised, Elizabeth, I hope during the during the discussion, but I see people in the chat have shared links to the SDG impact standards. So Bart, I'd like to turn to you. BLM has pioneered so many of the concepts behind stakeholder capitalism. And now really having achieved kind of some initial goals as part of what is a really dramatic movement to redefine the purpose of business. What is driving what seems to be a dramatic acceleration in the movement? And what challenges remain? And then perhaps alongside that, you can talk a little bit more about the impetus behind the SDG impact action manager. That you've all launched with you in global compact and how that relates to the standards that Elizabeth just introduced. Sure. So of course, thank you for having me, Christina. I appreciate the invitation and it's awesome to be here with some old friends. So excited to be with you all the day. And first, kind of like at the highest level, I assume most people on SOCAP would know what a B corporation is, but I'm not going to be talking about what's driving some acceleration and address your other questions as well, Christina. And so I'm with B-Lab. B-Lab is the nonprofit behind the B-Corporation movement. And at the highest level, what we're trying to do is build a movement of people using business as a force for good. And our approach is really simple. We find best in class companies that we certify as B-Corporations. They've met the highest standards of social and social rights. And that's the best way to legal change. We have about 3,600 certified B-Corporations in 150 different industries, probably 80 countries, ranging from multi-billion-dollar companies down to sole proprietors. And our hope is that if we shine a light on them and then provide tools for others to follow, that we'll build this movement, right, where everybody is trying to use business as a force for good. And what I think is it's been a remarkable year. It's been a remarkable couple of years. And that's what's driving, you know, the acceleration of kind of the broader movement of impact and stakeholder capitalism. I think a few things are quite clear. Number one, I think traditional capitalism is under threat, whether it be, you know, the recognition that it changes indeed an existential threat to business entities and or the additional threat of rising inequality, like inequality is not new, but it is accelerating. And all of that has led to some real pressure on the system. And we saw some of that in 2019, resulting in the announcement from the Business Roundtable and what came out of the weft as their new imperative. All of that was indicative of some cultural shifts. Now, fast forward to this year, Christina, and the pandemic has sadly just laid bare the inequities of our current system. It's just abundantly clear that the economy just isn't working for everyone the same way. And as a result, what we've seen, both from companies and from governments, is a huge increase in the interest in our work. In the first nine months of this year, we've had 37,000 companies registered to use our tools. To give you a perspective, it took us five years to get to 25,000. And in the first nine months, we've had 37,000 using the tools to be more like a corporation. The other things that we're seeing in just the first nine months, we've had 1,800 companies apply to actually certify. They've gone all the way through the process and said they want to be a leader and part of this community. And also really interesting, Christina, our attrition rates are at record lows. Despite the incredible impact on the global economy of the pandemic, our community is thriving. And so the combination of climate change and equality in the pandemic has really encouraged people to not return to normal, that I think people are asking, coming out of this pandemic, what is the new normal? And that question is happening at the very highest level of government. It's happening at the very highest level of the private sector. And civil society is contributing where they can to make sure that we're part of that conversation. In terms of what the challenges are for us moving forward, I think there's a few. One, we need to scale with integrity, Christina, like it. It's really exciting that we have a profound interest, which we think is authentic and multinationals. And I think for those people familiar with our movement, it began as a small, medium enterprise movement. And as only recently in the last five years, migrated to larger multinationals. And we are beautifully inundated with requests to engage in the movement. And we need to do that carefully. At the end of the day, we've got to uphold the integrity and the rigor of the certification, while simultaneously welcoming people into the movement, no matter where they are, and say, join us on this journey. We use business as a force for good. And to that end, we released a new product about two months ago, something called B movement builders. And it's specifically for multinationals who aren't yet ready for the certification, but want to use the tools and be supportive of the broader effort to use business as a force for good. And so that's one of our efforts to try to scale with integrity. The other big challenge has always been, Christina, companies adopting our legal framework. As I said, there's two elements to certify. One is you take and pass our impact assessment, and it's verified. And the second is you change your legal governance to include the interests of stakeholders so that you are accountable to not just creating money for your investors, but also while you're operating your business, creating real value for society and the environment. That legal change is a big deal, right? It changes fiduciary duty. And it has been, we have passed legislation now in four countries and in 40 states creating a new corporate form that allows you to live into that aspiration to align your mission with your governance. That change is hard for public companies. And the good news is we're seeing the dam start to break, whether it be Amalgamated Bank, which is a certified B Corp, took the vote, their public company, they took the vote to change into this new legal form that's called the Benefit Corp earlier this year, and they had a 99% approval of the change. Denone in Paris, the global dairy business and food business, took their vote about two months ago. And I think it was 28 million to less than a million in terms of in support of this change. Lemonade went public, it's an insurance company, went public earlier this year as a Benefit Corp and a certified B Corp. It was the best IPO of the year. And then we just, a company called, we don't know a company called Viva, which is a life science company, a $46 billion life science company actually put out a proxy statement to a vote to change into a Benefit Corporation. And that vote is pending. And so there are cracks in the dam about adopting this legal framework at scale. It will be a process. It won't be an event, Christina, but I would say those are the big challenges for the movement, scaling with integrity and figuring out how to get broader adoption of the legal. And then finally on the STG Action Manager, listen, we're also totally clear that the idea of B corporations is still really a, an idea that not many people know about globally. The STGs have broken through. They've absolutely broken through. And it's so encouraging and exciting. And the idea of partnering with the UNGC about trying to take our work with our impact assessment and relate it back to the STGs. Just like Elizabeth said, give people a roadmap on how to use their business to try to achieve the STGs. We were hearing over and over people say, listen, I love the STGs. I don't know what to do. Like where do I start? How do I contribute to these goals? And so we spent about 18 months with our partners at the UNGC building a tool that's free and totally available for anybody to use and it lets you set targets that gives you a clear pathway to contribute to the STGs that matter most for your business. And I'll stop there. I have to say during a time when we could all be so despondent about the state of the world, the state of politics, the economy, I think you could go into providing emotional psychological therapy. That's about the most optimistic kind of treatise I've heard for a while. And the tagline scale with integrity is one we really adopted at Blue Mark as well. We think it's absolutely critical at this point in time, especially as the B-Corp movement that also impact investing, sustainable investing, sort of gains share of hearts and minds, we need to ensure that we scale this market with integrity and not the expense of integrity. So I'm going to turn to Omid now. Omid, you're running one of extremely large institutions and a very large institutional portfolio of impact investments. And Prudential has a really uniquely influential role in this market. I think bringing such a range of capital types. I'd like to talk about Prudential's early experience in using kind of third-party tools as a way to help scale with integrity and make more efficient evaluation of funds that it's investing in. So one of those tools was the GEARS rating framework, which was an early, really an early framework in this market to bring impact investment ratings, akin to credit ratings for impact funds. And B-Lab was very obviously helped spearhead that. Why didn't GEARS succeed at that time? How does impact verification now fit into Prudential's approach to do diligently and managing impact funds? Yeah. Thank you for the kind introduction and just a sort of context for people who are not familiar with our program. I think we are about a billion dollar fund, all invested in private assets, but invested both in real assets as well as in businesses and social purpose enterprises, as well as being invested both directly in transactions and through fund managers and doing debt and equity. And so from that vantage point, we've seen a sort of lot of perspectives. One of the things that we did try to do, I think, with our fund portfolio, particularly for our private equity fund managers, was to really insist that they adopt the GEARS standard. And one of the things that we learned, actually, is that as even relatively modest capital allocators to an individual fund, you have tremendous power to dictate impact reporting and impact standards. I think just a few investors asking for something, you may prompt a little bit of grumbling from your managers, but at the end of the day, there is tremendous power at the investor level to demand reporting enhanced standards. So that's one successful. We're now doing that around things like diversity and inclusion metrics as well. So one lesson we took away was actually, small people demanding disclosure can happen. So that's a positive. We did want people to adopt sort of the GEARS tool and ultimately the BeCorp analytic framework, because we wanted a standardized instrument to look at people who are investing in a range of geographies, a range of stages, a range of companies. I think what was successful was sort of the ability of the tool to be an assessment of individual companies. If you listen to Bart, that's sort of where the movement is really built into thinking about sort of how do you evaluate a company comprehensively? I think the challenge as a user for sort of rolling up a portfolio is that, and this is sort of a challenge for all of us who are sort of looking at bigger data sets and bigger sort of universes. And Andrew, can I think talk even more about this in an even larger context, is sort of how do you balance the tool that has rigor in the specific with a tool that has sort of universal applicability? And so if you look at sort of all of the stuff that's going on in the public markets and ESG, that's one of their core challenges is that they're trying to apply to such a vastly different data set that you necessarily have to get to a sort of level of shallowness to apply across the board. And this has been something that actually I think has been a real tension that we eventually I think solved by recognizing that we didn't care as much to have broad based metrics that apply to everything in the portfolio. We actually thought we found that we're much more able to come up with compelling impact metrics by really circling subsets of the portfolio and identifying what were the two or three core elements that those investors were designed to change. So if it was around sort of job skilling and job training, looking at job and wage growth and looking at a few very narrow, very precise measures for a sub or subset of the portfolio rather than looking for universal measures. So that was one sort of big insight was that that was more valuable to us in terms of sort of telling the story of the portfolio. The second, and I think, you know, deeper sort of challenge for any large investor is that even if you get good data and you aggregate it up, you're left with a staff that's somewhat devoid of meaning. So for example, we could say that our portfolio created 38,642 good jobs. We're very proud of that measurement exercise, but that data point was like so many other data points kind of devoid of meaning because you couldn't contextualize relative to what was that a lot of jobs created a lot of good jobs created or was that exactly the number of jobs that any set of private equity funds would have created. And I do think one of the challenges for our measurement systems right now is and especially I think when you're thinking about private equity, you're measuring outputs and outputs are often going to be a function of sort of the scale of the investment you invest. If you invest in a bigger thing, it'll have bigger output. If you invest in a rapidly growing thing, the delta will grow rapidly because you're investing in a rapidly growing. In the capitalist system, you know, the ability to something to grow is a function ultimately of the business model. And so I think we're measuring growth and outputs opposed to I think measures of quality. And I think that's sort of where we've really tried to hone into is to think about what are measures of quality, suitability, fit. You know, I'll give you examples, especially financial services. This becomes really paramount. You think about sort of a segment like serving subprime borrowers. Serving subprime borrowers in an ethical and transparent way can be incredibly good, providing people access to products they're not ready for without the appropriate guardrails can be incredibly bad. Measures of outputs in that sense of serving sort of, you know, marginalized communities without measures of quality. So I think one thing that we've really honed in on is trying to really look at measures of quality. The bigger Holy Grail that we don't have though is measures of context. So to measure sort of is this portfolio exceeding a benchmark relative to others, right? So if you think about conventional financial measures, you measure alpha and performance over benchmarks. You don't measure absolute returns and say this is good or bad. And right now we don't have that capacity in a meaningful way. And I think that's partly what sort of erodes trust. I mean, to go back to the sort of conference label, people are seeing lots of stats and lots of measures, but can't really tell if that's good or bad. And I think the dirty little secret, and you know, I think maybe it's not so dirty, but part of what you're seeing quite frankly is if you took the entire universe of capitalism, of course you can find stuff that was good, right? We can circle historically stuff that was good that was happening in the marketplaces. And anyone who's got a large enough portfolio can filter out the good stuff and say, look, I've got five billion of good stuff. I've got 10 billion good stuff. I've got 100 billion of good stuff. Look, I'm good. And people see that and it takes a second. I guess that kind of makes sense. But it has to be contextualized against what is the amount of good stuff in the overall market. And are we actually doing anything to add to impact fixed problems that aren't being fixed? It's that quality sort of additionality and change that we're not getting. So I think we are aptly proving that there is good stuff. There's thoughtful stuff. There's stuff that can be measured in what is going on in capitalism. But I think the skepticism people feel is that if there's all this good stuff, why are there so many problems? And so I think we're starting from a vantage point of measuring the good stuff that was in the capitalist system as opposed to vantage point of saying, here are the problems, the clear problems, and what are these investments doing to move the needle on solutions to these problems? And I think that's sort of a structural challenge. So I've said a lot, but that's some emotional observations. There was a tremendous amount packed into what you just said, but what I love is that you somehow elegantly transitioned us from the building blocks that Bart and team are putting together, building the B Corp movement at the corporate level, the adoption of rigorous standards of what constitutes real stakeholder accountability at the company level, but to the challenges from an investor standpoint of aggregating a portfolio and ensuring that when you're managing a billion dollars of assets, you're actually holding at a portfolio level to levels of accountability for impact equivalent to those for financial performance. So much packed in there. I think we want to get back to the conversation about impact measurement reporting challenges and issues, which is kind of perennially a vaccine problem for us. But before we do, Andrew, I want to turn to you because Andrew is in the unique position. I feel like we're almost taking this layered approach here in this panel, unique position of representing both a massive asset allocator and asset manager. Of sustainable and impact products. So you're kind of seeing the market from these two different perspectives. UBS also recently made the audacious announcement that it would seek to recommend sustainable investments wherever possible over traditional options for all of its wealth management clients, which represents 2.6 trillion in assets, I believe. So, Andrew, I'd love to hear first of all kind of the thinking behind this announcement, but more to the point, how are you as you seek to really help catalyze massive amounts of capital towards sustainable and impact investments, relying on accountability mechanisms, verification mechanisms to ensure that you're allocating assets to the right to the right products or the best impact products? Yeah, it's a great question. So first of all, thanks, Christine, again, for having me on the panel. I think it's great to be here with all of you. Couldn't agree more with many of the things that Bart, Elizabeth, and Omid have already kind of indicated. And I think that you asked about the announcement. I think that for us, the announcement's just the evolution of a shift that we've seen over the years of investors recognizing that sustainability matters, whether it's Bart was saying climate actually, people finally realize that this is a problem, right? Or inequality, which has been something that's been on our radar for a while, and yet all of a sudden now this year brings inequality issues into stark focus, right? So I think there's a realization increasingly amongst investors that, and private investors, individual investors who've been used to looking at returns only, perhaps, and thinking about, you know, the doing good through philanthropy. But I think this realization is really kind of inflected over the last few years, and I think this year in particular. And so, you know, for us, it wasn't about this year or it was more of an evolution of, you know, from an investment perspective, we do believe and we have long believed that, you know, sustainability factors, whether it's years or G, do impact investments and help investors from a risk and opportunity perspective in ways that can't be ignored. So from an investment perspective, I think all of that was in place. I think you've now seen demand from individual investors come into the market alongside, I think, what are scalable products that belong on broader platforms come in to enable investors to really build full diversified portfolios that respect sustainability in some way, shape, or form into their portfolios in ways that allow them to implement the objectives that they have that are beyond just financial return. And so I think on the one hand, I think that's incredibly exciting, right, it means that the things that many of the people in this room have been working on for so long, you know, we are seeing a continued flow of capital and interest and perhaps a real focus now on the fact that there are real problems, as Omid said, you know, that need to be solved and bringing more capital to bear in investment portfolios is really something that's great. And I think the increased sophistication of investors in understanding how that capital is invested and how sustainability is incorporated into portfolios, that's also really exciting. But I think, as Omid was starting to allude to, the risk is that people get misled by, you know, false statistics or things that are meant to provide transparency and are, you know, perhaps have good intentions, but in the end, end up not leading people towards the right conclusions, right? So you start to look at products in liquid portfolios, for example, where, you know, people feel better or investors feel better because they're aligned to a set of better companies where they're thematically focused. And, you know, there's reporting that indicates that, you know, my portfolio versus the benchmark portfolio, you know, you've removed X amount of emissions from something, right? But actually you haven't, right? Those emissions are still there. And so, you know, so I think, you know, there's a little bit of the danger of metrics leading people down the wrong path. And so, you know, I think the focus on the impact end of the spectrum, where people are really coming with an intent to drive intentional change, to drive measurable change, you know, that we're all looking for. You know, I think the increasing sophistication of a broad set of investors around the table, individual investors, really means that people are starting to realize that, you know, I can do certain things in philanthropy. I can do certain things by perhaps excluding, you know, excluding companies from my portfolio and signaling to companies what's important. I can use, you know, thematic opportunities are great in a diversified portfolio. But what are they actually accomplishing in terms of, you know, inflecting us or creating that delta that we know needs to be addressed in order to actually address the SDGs, right, to go back to what Elizabeth was saying. Are we actually addressing the core problems that we all face? And so that kind of points people towards where is that product set that actually does generate real impact, right, and create the delta. And that I think is what people are focused on now, increasingly. So I think with the broad flow of capital in, there are some things that, you know, as Omid was alluding to, you accept certain things, right, in order to broadly move capital into the space, particularly in liquid markets, where the scale is important to signal to companies that change is required. But I think, you know, at this impact end of the spectrum, where we say there's an intention to drive change, what is it? Like how can we actually be certain that someone who's labeling their fund and impact fund to go back to the origins, right, the gears, you know, starting from the roots of gears and what B-Lab built. But what's actually driving change? If I as an investor am allocating capital and someone's telling me, whether it's the fund manager or an intermediary or what have you, that change is happening, what is that change that's actually happening and can you quantify it for me in a way that's more than just, you know, this delta in the public markets that's not actually indicating that anything tangible has changed. But I think it comes down to, you know, impact standards or impact frameworks, principles, right? So the IFC's impact operating principles. How do we actually, you know, how can we be sure that things are actually happening when we say, when someone says impact is actually being created? How are we measuring that? How is it actually being managed along the way? And to Amid's last point, maybe I'll stop here around additionality. How do we know that it wouldn't have happened otherwise, right? And I think that that's something that really needs to be proved out is what's happening? Is it capital that wasn't being brought to the table before? Or is it, you know, that particular investor is able to open up networks and really drive impact and help companies to achieve the impact that they're looking for, whether it's through scale or additional expertise or relationships that really points us in the right direction and starts to get back to the idea of the SDGs, right? What are the SDGs? They show us the gaps. And if we're going to close the gaps, we actually have to show the Delta, not just incremental change in our portfolios. And the context is really important, as Amid alluded to. Thank you, Andrew. This conversation has gotten so sophisticated. I want to step back for just one moment, unless our participants think we're still struggling with everything. I think a lot of what Andrew was saying, if I can try and paraphrase, is that we've made really incredible leaps and bounds as an industry when it comes to almost like ex-anti-accountability mechanisms for how we sort, how we classify products and how we hold investors and investment managers accountable to their practices. When it comes to sort of ex-post frameworks for measurement, measuring what actually happened, did the intended impact occur? I think that's where both Amid and Andrew, you're touching on still some really significant vaccine challenges. And I want to just dive a little deeper into that question, because I think we're at a point in the market where there's almost two camps. I think we heard from both Andrew and Amid right now that the danger of anchoring to a narrow set of metrics or attempting to sort of anchor to a universal metric of the entire portfolio level or what have you, the importance of qualitative information and mechanisms. And yet there's a real camp that says the Holy Grail here is that we hold this market to the same level of rigor and of accounting rigor as our financial standards. So I'd like to just dig in a little bit there and ask you about this question. Maybe I'll turn it back to Amid. Is sort of a highly standardized and quantitative basis for impact outcomes? Is it the Holy Grail or is it something we shouldn't actually, is it a false emission or a mission we shouldn't be pursuing? It's a great question. Amid. Amid, you heard? Okay. Sorry. So it's a great question. I think that certainly the work that's asked me and others have done to define what a unit is or define what an it is in a common language, I think is really, really valuable. And the analogy to sort of accounting and adding rigor and standardization there so that what people are describing, something that we're all talking about the same thing is quite, quite valuable. I still think at the end of the day, values are human and values are not universal. We can disagree and share and be combative about value. So I think this will necessarily be more difficult than simply measuring financial performance, right? Because there is a diversity of values. And I would even go further and say to think that we've got a universality on the financial questions today. We don't have to look at the capital markets to see that, things don't trade on PE multiples anymore. And every company worth its salt is reporting non-gap financials alongside gap financials and a whole slew of measures. And so the standardization function is useful. It's useful to have gap even when everyone reports non-gap. But the point that needs to be taken is that of course people are going to report non-gap measures or non-SASB measures. And that will be even more diversified when it comes to necessarily complex value questions. And so I think leaning away from that as opposed to into that, I think is one of the mistakes. Again, because values are not universal, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to sort of transparently disclose what they are and measure what those different values are and investors have some ability to choose. I think one other point I'd make and I think it's really worth thinking about is that so much of our logic in the financial markets is commingling and diversification. So you think about a private equity fund, you think about an index fund, the whole rubric underlying it is you buy everything and you put it together and you get better outcomes. None of us think about our social impact that way. I wouldn't want a commingled diversified charity. For the love of God, that would seem crazy. Some people care about whales and people care about children and others. That's part of our problem, is that so much of the internal plumbing and architecture of the financial system is designed to blend different things together. And in so doing, we actually, I think, have to think about what are ways in which we can give people more idiosyncratic ability to access impact and make that transparent and allow people to have a greater diversity of choice. I think that's the thing that's been there. Great. Thanks, Omid. I'd like to actually turn to you, Bart, as well on this question, just to get the lens from sort of the B Corp perspective. I mean, B Corps obviously are held to kind of a rigorous legal standard. They're held to a rigorous standard of corporate practices and operational measures. What about the impacts that B Corps are having in the world and how is B Lab thinking about sort of those ex-post frameworks for measuring actual contributions to, for example, the SDGs and holding corporations to account to their stated alignment? I agree with all that was said, that it's super challenging to take the outputs that we see being delivered by our community of certified B corporations, translate them into outcomes and impact. Like that has been the, for this entire space, for as long as I've been in it, which is now 15 years, that has been incredibly challenging, is how do you, can you, and is it fair to take an output and then determine an outcome and an impact thereafter? That remains challenging even for us. And the way that we've tried to look at it, Christina, is our easiest way to evaluate this is if all companies acted like a B corporation, how would the world be different? That has been the framework through which we've tried to define our impact. We know that these B Corps are doing these things on equity, diversity, inclusion, on offsetting carbon, on creating high quality living wage jobs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so our easiest framework to describe the impact that we have is if we could convince all companies to be more like a B Corp, this is what the world would look like. Admittedly, that's a narrative that works for us and doesn't work for everybody. And I do want to, I want to back up also to your question about the Holy Grail, because I do want to agree wholeheartedly with Omid that it is necessary but insufficient. At the end of the day, there's a lot of things that we're trying to do that we're trying to do that we're trying to harmonize harmonization that we're all seeking. And the good news, Christine, as I tell you, like there is more action on the harmonization than we've had in a decade. People are playing nice. They're having real honest conversations. Our friends at IMP led by Clara Barbie has really been quite catalytic in bringing us together to talk about how to try to harmonize. And without that harmonization, the Holy Grail, it's necessary but insufficient. Great. Great. I love that answer. I do want to make sure we get, we give some chance for the audience Q&A. I'm going to, well, there's quite a few questions that are around B-Corps and B-Labs. I'm going to take a chance and have one of the participants who are waiting in the queue to ask a live question and see if we can make this work, get a little bit more interactive here instead of me just mediating this conversation. That being said, I'm going to ask whoever's brought in to please keep the question brief and to the point so we leave time for the rest of the discussion. So I'm going to start here with Mary Wong. Let's see if this works. I'm trying to let her in. Let's see. Okay. I apologize. I'm afraid that's not working. Okay. So I'm going to continue then. And, you know, I think one of the questions here is around, you know, as impact and sustainability reporting is becoming increasingly common, increasingly pervasive as a recognized requirement, what role do the regulators play? And what's the most, I'll just add to that, what's the most productive role for regulators and other state institutions to play in both, in both enforcing standards that are being created and making really prescriptive requirements about disclosures. Elizabeth, why don't I start with you? Okay. So we absolutely think that regulation is important and but probably more so that the huge interest and surge I would suggest in creating taxonomies and metrics and trying to have much more, much more information about how to measure and manage has been helpful. But what's really been missing is that these taxonomies and these metrics need to operate within a context. And what we found that when we were looking at this really crowded landscape as we've heard about that and how to be additive in that landscape that with all the principles, which are, you know, really setting high level purpose, and with all of the new performance standards and metrics and taxonomies, this increasingly confident landscape, nobody is really paying attention to practice and how things are done, not just what things get done. So our sort of point of departure when we started thinking about these practice standards were, you know, how do you really change behavior? And unless and until you change behavior, we're not going to see real change. It continues to be a tagging exercise or an output exercise. So what we've been focused on is regulation is necessary, perhaps, but what's even more necessary is giving investors and companies that management system to be able to operationalize their intentions at the high level and then in a consistent way, support the reporting at the tools level and that this would really drive standardization. It would drive transparency and assurance, which are also necessary to growing this market more at scale. And we think that, you know, if you open this up and you make it very transparent that you reduce that potential for the market fragmentation through a lot of bespoke implementations of impact practice that sort of impede that comparability and that transparency. So what we've been trying to do is to map alignment between the existing principles and these new regulations and sort of if you really think in a very concerted fashion going through these standards about, you know, your strategic intent and how you do that, your impact measurement and management and embed that in a way that is consistent and comparable and report out in a transparent way that the regulation will this, you know, the performance will drive the regulation, not vice versa. Great. Thanks Elizabeth. Andrew, I think you spend probably a lot of your days thinking about the regulators and what's coming next down the pike. I think Elizabeth, you did a nice job of just laying out the importance of practices as well as results kind of measurement frameworks, the means being as important as the end, so to speak. But, you know, as these standards kind of evolve and get refined, is this, you know, will the standards lead to more regulation or will they be helpful in terms of optimizing the role of regulators in this market, Andrew? What's your perspective coming at it from a large financial institution? That's a really good question. I mean, I want to say that I think they will do the latter. I think that they will help regulators with where they're trying to go with things. I think just being a little bit careful about saying what regulators should or should not do. I think that a lot of what we've seen has been focused on maybe on the sustainability side of things and standards around that and common frameworks. And I think that what still needs to happen is more standardization. And I don't think this piece of it comes out of the regulators necessarily on the impact piece of it and understanding what the outcomes are and so forth. And I don't know that we've quite gotten to a place where that piece of it is standardized. And I think that there's that, you know, so there's an element of understanding what's happening in your portfolio on a common kind of framework basis. And I think there is a lot of great work that's being done at the regulator level. And then by a number of the industry bodies out there, right? But I think that the impact piece is an interesting one that's still kind of out there to say, okay, can we understand what outcomes are actually being generated and acknowledging all of what Bart said about the difficulty of doing that and about people saying that we want to be able to optimize for these three legs of risk, return and impact. I don't think we're there yet in a way that, you know, you could legitimately say that I think we're in a way, there in a way that you can say you can optimize for risk and return and understand better what the impacts are of various elements in your portfolio. But I don't think we're there to kind of optimize for it. So I wouldn't want anybody to think that that's the case. But I also don't think that that's driven by regulators, right? I think the regulators can be very helpful in terms of, you know, setting certain standards and that can be helpful. But I do think that investors have to kind of take what they're given then and as I think Elizabeth was going on, you know, implement their own management systems for impact that take that into account. So, yeah, I mean, I think we're headed in the right direction. But I think if you're focused on impact, there's still a bit more work to be done there. Great. Great. Thanks, Andrew. You know, it relates to another, I think, big question that still hangs over our market as the standards keep evolving. Bart, you mentioned, you know, the great work that IMP and others are doing to help harmonize standards, particularly for corporate reporting, right? An integrated approach to corporate reporting on the investor side. You know, we still have a lot of competing standards. People still complain about the alphabet soup, even though we, you know, we think we're advancing. It's getting clear. How do we push for sort of the optimal? What is the optimal array of harmonized impact investment standards for the market? What does that look like in your mind? Maybe I'll start with Omid as a, as a representing an asset owner, institutional asset owner point of view. And then turn to you, Elizabeth. Yeah, so I would echo that the IMP's work has been really, I think, very powerful. And one of the best examples we've seen of harmonization for people who are not familiar with it, I had to keep away from them and see some of the questions in the chatter about this is that it's a measurement of investor practices. You know, the questions you asked, the things you looked at, the, you know, the mechanisms on exit, it's, it measures sort of what we would think of as the investor value add, as opposed to the underlying companies. And I think we'll ask some questions about culture. I think part of its success is really looking at that question. And that's why I think it, and I, I look to minds, you know, sometimes I think, you know, it's the most important thing actually in the world is really to identify and measure investor culture and the norms that are being used to guide decision making. And it can also be the weakest because it has no specific outputs. But I do think it really matters over time that we're getting there and we're harmonizing what it means to be an impact investor. Similarly, though, I don't think for all the reasons we talked about earlier, that will ever be the alphabet soup on the underlying impacts. And I think that's okay. I'm actually thinking maybe a virtue, not a flaw. And I do think one of the things that started to happen to your earlier question, I think it's really is what the dynamic is between investor practices and regulatory practices. So as regulators demand greater disclosure and greater standardization, that's one pressure avenue. Investors have been asking for that release impact. Investors have been asking for some of that. And the hope, and again, it's too early to say where there plays out is that there's a positive ratchet effect. That people on the regulatory community can point to successful investor standards. And investors can use sort of the regulatory levers to get more wholesome disclosure on questions. I think that's the positive case. I think the other thing that's starting to happen that I think is really interesting is you're starting to see greater, Bart, I'd love to, you guys have obviously taken the B-Lab movement globally. But one of the things I think we're starting to see here certainly in the U.S. is fragmentation between markets taking, even within the U.S., taking very different views on the regulatory state. If you look at California standards or the new cases of Uber and labor. So I think it's really interesting to think about sort of how much potential fragmentation await us in terms of where the regulatory state goes. I can't hear you. Christina. I can't hear you. Speeding along now because we're up against time, I apologize. So in 20 seconds or less, I'm going to ask each of you and please do go up mute as I forgot to do. You know, as we're reaching this inflection point towards stakeholder capitalism and gaining ever greater momentum on sustainable and impact investing, what is your big prediction for 2021? Either what's the biggest challenge we still face that we need to tackle or what you expect to be coming down the pike in the year to come. So Bart, I'll start with you and then we'll start with you. Sure. 20 seconds or less. I hope 2021. And I think we have signs of it. It's going to be the year of collaboration. The year where we've had this amazingly beautiful, but pretty and spoken, diverse fields starting to come together around shared initiatives. I think the imperative 21 effort that launched about a month ago was a good indicator of the power of bringing these initiatives together. So I think that's a good example. I think that's a good example. I think that's a good example. I think that's a good example. I'm hoping that we'll see more of that in 2021. Without it, we got a long, long road. Great. Thanks, Bart. Elizabeth. Yeah, I can pick up right where Bart left off. For me, I guess stakeholder capitalism. I hope that this means putting sustainability and impact on people on the planet at the heart of what we do. So I think the future is going to be a lot more ahead of the future. I think that we're going to see a lot more of a focus on taking a more holistic view beyond those short term financial values and really appreciating more of the interconnectedness of the goals. So I do think we're going to see an improvement and more of a focus on impact. Great. Andrew. So agree with Bart and Elizabeth. I think collaboration. of capital at scale into broadly sustainable and impact investing. And what that is gonna create together with that emphasis on impact that Elizabeth mentioned is a need for investors to really pick through and understand what are the right solution sets that help them meet their objectives from an impact perspective. So continued flow, but need for more rigor. I'm loving the optimistic trend in these comments. No pressure, Omid, but it's all on you to wrap it up. Oh goodness, well, I'm not the optimist of the group. So I think we continue to see the incredible and when you call it the K-shaped recovery of what's happened with sort of the pull forward of technology. And I think this is probably the first year and you see it in the suit that just got filed with Google where I think we start to have some really serious questions about sort of monopoly power and particularly sort of the role in technology in society and what that's dealing from an inequality perspective. Just given sort of what's happened with the devastating impact on small businesses versus the incredible success for large businesses and what that feel looks like when we do come out of COVID. Great, well, greater scale, greater accountability and greater clarity of purpose is I think the themes that came out of this. I know we didn't have time to get into so many of the issues that we're touched on but thank you so much. You've been a fabulous panel. Apologies to everybody about the technical glitch is not least on my own part but so much. I appreciate it. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thanks, Christina. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thanks, Christina.