sri

Impact investing is at a stage where family offices can get involved without having to chart unknown territory, according to a new appointment at Trusted Family, who previously worked for LGT Venture Philanthropy.

Wolfgang Hafenmayer became the new head of impact advisory at Trusted Family in January, and will be responsible for expanding societal impact solutions for business-owning families that are part of the online network.

Impact investing isn’t only for the softhearted. In the past year alone, BlackRock launched new business unit BlackRock Impact, Goldman Sachs bought impact advisory firm Imprint, and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick now heads up Bain & Capital’s impact fund. “Some of the most celebrated and followed world-class investors have jumped into impact investing in the last year,” says Jean Case, AOL Inc entrepreneur and CEO at the Case Foundation.

Index investing traces its roots back more than 50 years and socially responsible investing (SRI)—a child of the 1970s—is no spring chicken either. Yet only recently have the two investing strategies become integrated in a way that does justice to both.
 
Investing with goals beyond profits alone has traditionally meant giving up conventional indexing strategies. SRI, in essence, is an active investment strategy, which leaves little if any room for the passive notions of buying stocks and puts it at odds with tapping indexing's low costs and competitive returns.