Triodos Bank notices an increasing desire for impact investing opportunities amongst retail investors. Retail investors already are a significant force in the development of impact investment. However, upcoming regulation and a focus on professional investors might prevent this sector to reach its full potential. Therefore the bank urges policy makers and regulators to focus on extending retail impact investment to the broader public. That is the main message of the report ‘Impact Investing for everyone: a blueprint for retail impact investing ’, which is presented today at the TBLI Conference in Amsterdam.

The report is designed to catalyze an important debate among policy-makers and regulators in order to create better impact investing opportunities for the wider public and to build a more diverse, resilient and better informed investment market.

James Vaccaro, Head of Corporate Strategy at Triodos Bank and author of the report: “We encourage all actors within the system, but in particular governments and regulators, to look closely at which mechanisms could best overcome the current market barriers. If successful, this could help transform the entire culture of investing within society and create a fairer, values based and transparent financial sector.”

The Triodos Bank report is complementing the report of the G8’s Social Impact Investment Taskforce ‘Impact Investment: the invisible heart of markets’, which is designed to catalyse a global market in impact investing.

Peter Blom, CEO of Triodos Bank, is the EU representative on the taskforce. Both reports are available at www.socialimpactinvestment.org .