Low-income women in South and Southeast Asia face a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Few have a formal bank account. Women farmers in Asia work  more hours per week in the field than men, but earn much less. With little or no access to electricity, they’re exposed to toxic fumes from kerosene lamps and stoves. The list goes on. 

Those are some of the problems IIX is trying to address with its Women’s Livelihood Bond (WLB). In 2017, the Singapore-based social impact finance pioneer introduced its first $8 million WLB, which pooled together a group of impact enterprises to issue a collective bond aimed at improving women’s economic opportunity. IIX’s proprietary impact assessments were used to measure the social impact and financial viability of the borrowers.  READ MORE

“Many different organizations have pioneered the creation of new accounting metrics that undergird the IMP’s efforts. The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) standards, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards, and B Lab’s B Impact Assessment, provide consensusbased sets of criteria that measure the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies and practices of companies big and small…

These advances, in turn, have informed the work of a broader ecosystem of actors. First, there are groups working to expand impact investing, such as the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG), the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), the Impact Investment Exchange (IIX), and Toniic. Second, there are efforts to ground social and environmental outcomes in context—whether for regional priorities to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations Development Programme [UNDP]), for systems to facilitate corporate efforts to address these goals (World Benchmarking Alliance) …” READ MORE

Managing Director Robert Kraybill discusses how IIX uses financial markets to directly and proactively benefit society.

Employing innovative financial instruments and a range of platforms to best ensure that capital invested has a social and environmental impact as well as a financial return is fundamental to Investment Impact Exchange’s (IIX) business model.

IIX’s Managing Director, Robert Kraybill, who has twenty years of finance and investment banking experience said that: “the 2008 Financial Crisis was a wakeup call to ask myself how can we use the tools of the traditional finance markets in a way that will directly and proactively benefit society.” Read more.