Microfinance, impact investing and pension fund investment policy survey

The survey is the most comprehensive canvass (to date) of opinion leaders in the UK pension fund industry about their attitudes towards Impact Investment.

The Impact Investment market requires innovation, commitment and significant pools of capital to enable social businesses to grow and deliver at scale. It offers products that deliver financial returns alongside measurable social impact. Its success will be judged in part on the size of the capital flows it attracts from institutional investors (e.g. pension funds). Unlike some of their peers in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and the USA, pension funds in the UK have been slow to consider Impact Investment in their portfolios. The survey was an attempt to understand why.

We wanted to assess the level of Impact Investment undertaken today by UK pension funds, the appetite for future Impact Investment, and the level of awareness of Impact Investment, as well as to raise awareness within the Industry of the Impact Investment ​“asset class” and some of the investment opportunities on the market.

In this report you will find the results of 47 organisations who took part in the survey. Together they hold £143bn AUM and serve 4.5 million pension holders.