Why is impact investing a new and critical frontier for investors? This panel will be a lively discussion by financial, business and technology innovators in the impact investing sector. Impact investors believe that capital can be deployed in more effective and efficient ways to ensure lasting social, economic, and environmental impact. By aligning diverse interests through investment models and capital structures, a variety of emerging investment and business models enable investors, business, and social entrepreneurs to examine market and policy failures through the lens of finance and overcome them. Impact investors believe it's possible to solve social or environmental challenges while generating sustainable returns (both financial and social). Long-term investors, in particular, consider such factors as climate change, overcoming technological divides, health, workforce policies and economic conditions to be an essential part of effective risk management. These impact investors vary in size (from small funds to large institutions), in sector (from private capital to public agencies) and in approach (from exercising ownership to restructuring government funding through private-public partnerships). But they all recognize that investments can produce benefits or costs beyond the targeted financial returns, and that investors and society alike are better off when investment decisions include these multiple factors. Questions to be addressed include: Do social and environmental targets for investment require different forms of credit analysis? Does combining public-private and philanthropic investors enhance or diminish returns? What particular challenges face the formulation of investment targets and barriers to investment (regulatory, training, data, others)? The government has taken an important first step by formulating ideas for a social investment fund. How can this be scaled? What additional steps can be made to mobilize financial institutions through new initiatives or through capital markets with social impact bonds to further scale this new wave of investment activity?
participants:

Chanoch Barkat, Founder and Director, Dualis
Morris Dorfman, Senior Economist The National Economic Council, Prime Minister's Office
Adv. Didi Lachman-Messer, Former Deputy Attorney General for Economic and Fiscal Laws
Yaron Neudorfer, Director General, Social Finance Israel
Steven Puig, Vice President, Inter- American Development Bank
Prof. Glenn Yago, Senior Director, Milken Institute
Moderator: Adv. Paul Irving, Chief Operating Officer, Milken Institute