When 2019 comes around congress will once again be divided. Could an impact oriented infrastructure bill make it to the president's desk? Our roundtable discusses.

ImpactAlpha’s editor and CEO David Bank and Paul van Zyl talk about impact investing and social entrepreneurship from the Conduit in London.

In its daily Brief and on its website, ImpactAlpha writes a lot about the challenges and triumphs of impact entrepreneurs. In this week’s Returns on Invesment podcast, host Brian Walsh put the questions to the company’s own mission-driven entrepreneurs: How’s the business going?

Join David Bank and Dave Chen as they continue our special series, Institutional Shift. The latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Returns on Investment podcast takes stock of the state of impact investing at pension funds and other large institutional investors.

Lower-than-expected risk. Higher-than-expected impact. Access to off-grid electricity is emerging as an impact investing success story across the developing world.

The impact investing community seems to be in one of its cyclical discussions about who and what should count as impact.

The latest Returns on Investment podcast takes up the growing concern about “impact-washing,” the use of impact jargon or marketing to raise money or burnish reputations without delivering real impact or, in some cases, causing negative impacts.

What will it take for investors to make the big bets?

ImpactAlpha’s latest Returns on Investment podcast took on what roundtable regular Imogen Rose-Smith, an investment fellow at the University of California, called “the disconnect between rhetoric and reality.”

The latest Returns on Investment podcast takes up the case of the $1 billion Abraaj Growth Markets Health Fund and impact investing failures more broadly. The health fund, which was pursuing an ambitious effort to build comprehensive healthcare networks in the megacities of the 21st century – think Lagos and Karachi and Mumbai – is now embroiled in the larger scandal that has engulfed Abraaj Group.

Impact investing types, it seems, are proud globalists. That optimistic, connected, cross-border approach to challenges, solutions and human relationships puts them in a unique position in this peculiar historic moment when walls are going up and strangers are suspect. At the same time, the essential precondition of investing – having capital to invest – means most investors are largely distant from the lived experience of many of the people their investments are purported to benefit. ImpactAlpha's roundtable regulars take on the contradictions of globalism.

(Photo: Top view of 1765 de l'Isle globe A 1765 de l'Isle globe, showing top view. Collection of the Minnesota Historical Society.)

In the latest Returns on Investment podcast, our roundtable regulars take up the April memo from the Department of Labor that tried, albeit weakly, to walk back the Obama-era guidance about how fiduciaries could consider ESG factors.