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, BlueMark set out with a clear mission: to strengthen trust in and accountability for the impact claims of investors in order to help scale investing for impact. We sought to achieve that mission by providing rigorous and independent verification to a rapidly expanding market, with the newly launched Operating Principles for Impact Management (OPIM) as the framework on which our original methodology was built. After 6 years, BlueMark has verified 58% of all OPIM signatories that have engaged a third-party verifier.
Like the market, BlueMark has evolved since those early days, using our strength in independent verification to offer more to our clients and the broader market. Building on OPIM, we developed the Fund ID™, our proprietary methodology for assessing impact accountability at the fund level, and have completed over 100 verifications and over 20 LP-initiated due diligence assessments against it. We’ve also become a trusted provider of limited assurance services of sustainably-linked loans and impact KPIs, with over 40 engagements completed to date.
And more recently, we’ve used the data and expertise we’ve built across these 500+ assessments to develop new tools for LPs and asset allocators. BlueMark IQ Diligence brings our opinions and judgement on fund managers to LPs’ diligence process in a streamlined, tech enabled platform. IQ Diligence has quickly become a key component of the impact diligence process of several LPs, including GHIC, LetterOne, and Tsao Family Office.
To all our clients, friends, BlueMark alumni, and those we are yet to meet, please reach out to reflect on how far we’ve come as a field in recent years and discuss where we’re going. Onward!
With gratitude,
Christina Leijonhufvud
1. Client AUM is self-reported at the time of engagement.
2. Figure represents the total AUM assessed by BlueMark as a percentage of the global impact investing market, estimated at $1.571 trillion USD by the Global Impact Investing Network in Sizing the Impact Investing Market 2024. As the two figures are derived using different methodologies, this percentage should be read as indicative.