Strengthening trust, transparency, and accountability for the impact of investments

Dear Friends, This summer, BlueMark celebrated a huge milestone: we completed our 500th independent assessment across our verification, assurance, and market intelligence services. Not only is this a notable accomplishment for BlueMark’s team, it also confirms the investment industry’s continued pursuit of impact and sustainability goals and embrace of best practice impact management. In 2020, […]

In a piece published in Alliance Magazine, Jack Isaacs and Sarah Gelfand argue that impact investing is more accessible than ever for foundations and their endowments.

The Impact Diligence Gap The playbook for financial due diligence is well established – and investors in private market funds have decades of shared practice to draw on when developing their diligence processes. But that playbook focuses only on the question of whether a manager is likely to generate strong financial returns. It doesn’t help […]

BlueMark has partnered with R&I, Japan’s leading credit rating agency, to launch Instrument ID: an assessment of impact accountability for the impact-driven lending products of Japanese financial institutions. In our 2025 report with Tideline and Builders Vision, Scaling Solutions: The Fixed Income Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight, BlueMark showed that fixed income strategies have the […]

Paul Ramsay Foundation shares the learnings, benefits, and results of their BlueMark verification in this detailed report.

BlueMark IQ is backed by funding from Ford Foundation, S&P Global, Temasek Trust Capital, and Tsao Family Office. BlueMark, the market’s leading provider of independent impact assessments and market intelligence for the investment industry, today announced the launch of the BlueMark IQ platform, which is custom-designed to make it easier for asset allocators to identify, […]

Research collaboration between Builders Vision, Tideline and BlueMark highlights the impact of fixed income investments

Despite its status as the world’s largest asset class, fixed income is rarely thought of as a vehicle for social or environmental impact. A new research collaboration between Builders Vision, Tideline and BlueMark presents impact investing in fixed income (or “impact fixed income”) as an accessible and attractive means of generating positive impacts for people and the planet, without any financial trade-off.

Critical and widely recognized social and environmental challenges, such as broadening access to economic opportunities and strengthening climate resilience, require bold, often capital-intensive solutions.

The price tags far exceed the current reach of the impact investing market.

For example, reaching the Sustainable Development Goals requires investments of $6 trillion annually in areas like facilitating universal access to digital resources, curbing pollution, and transitioning to sustainable food systems. That’s four times the total assets currently allocated to impact.

Impact verification firm BlueMark has placed nine first-time entrants on its Practice Leaderboard, a list of impact investors who rank in the top quartile across eight categories of impact management.

BlueMark and Tideline—two sister firms that specialize in working with impact investors, including asset allocators, asset managers, and intermediaries—have been named Institutional Limited Partners Association (ILPA) Sustainable Investing & Impact Community Partners. BlueMark and Tideline will provide ILPA’s LP members with insights, tools, and best practices for building and managing portfolios of impact funds.

BlueMark today announced the appointment of Nick O’Donohoe to its Board of Directors. As a prominent leader in the impact investing market, Nick’s guidance and support will be invaluable as BlueMark continues to scale its efforts to bring greater accountability and transparency to the impact investing industry. O’Donohoe brings a unique and diverse background, having led impact investing at J.P. Morgan, Better Society Capital (formerly known as Big Society Capital), and British International Investment (BII). His experience gives him a deep understanding of how BlueMark’s ratings and market intelligence can help meet the distinct data and information needs of various asset owners and allocators.

How can the complex and variable impact attributes of investment products be distilled into something that is simple to interpret and easy to use?
This challenge has animated many investors, consultants, data providers, and organiza- tions seeking to streamline the evaluation and management of investment products over the years. Within the impact investing industry, clarifying how to effectively and efficiently interpret a product’s impact credentials is a major topic of conversation, with many market participants seeing this clarity as a necessary precursor to unlocking additional capital.

Impact investing today finds itself at a crossroads, navigating a natural tension between two paths–the imperative for growth and the obligation to maintain rigorous accountability. But what if there was a middle path, one that balances scaling with safeguarding market integrity? The good news is impact investing continues to grow as more investors embrace “impact” […]

In the early days of impact investing, some investors would make the case for setting impact targets. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, they argued.
The not-always explicit response: Yes, and you can’t be held accountable for what you never promised. The latest Making the Mark report from the impact verification firm BlueMark found that only 42% of clients set impact performance targets as a condition of their investments. A larger number, 58%, work with portfolio companies to set targets after investments are made.

Where are investors well positioned to report in line with the Impact Performance Reporting Norms? And where can investors improve?

Impact verification firm BlueMark has added four investors to its Practice Leaderboard, a list of impact investors who score in the top quartile across eight categories of impact management. The new investors are BlueOrchard, Circulate Capital, Developing World Markets and Schroders. These groups join others already on the leaderboard: Bain Capital, Calvert Impact Capital, Finance in Motion, LeapFrog Investments, Nuveen Private Equity Impact and Trill Impact