Partners Group launches impact investment strategy

PG Life is positioned to invest exclusively in line with the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs), a broad set of objectives that cover areas such as education, healthcare, energy access, and social inclusion. Over the past three years, Partners Group has already committed an average of more than $1 billion a year through its direct investment programs into assets consistent with the SDGs.

PG Life is likely to tap into the firm’s general deal flow, filtering the investments that comply with its remit. An impact methodology will be used to measure the societal and environmental benefits generated by these assets. Its activities will be overseen by an impact committee chaired by Kevin Lu, partners and chairman of Asia at Partners Group. An external council, whose members include Cesar Purisima, a former secretary of finance for the Philippines, will provide strategic advice.

“PG Life was launched in response to clients who asked us to build on our existing ESG integration capabilities and create a mainstream private markets fund delivering quantifiable social and environmental impact. We believe that there is a genuine interest from many long-term investors globally in such strategies as a potential complement to more traditional impact investment funds, which tend to be smaller-scale and focused on more niche investments,” Lu said in a statement.

Partners Group is not the only global private equity firm to recognize this gap in the market. Last year, the North America-focused Bain Capital Double Impact Fund raised $390 million and then The Rise Fund, a global impact vehicle established by TPG Capital, closed at $2 billion. KKR is among the other groups expected to follow suit.

Partners Group also launched PG Impact Investments in 2015. Having initially made social investments through its employee foundation, the firm formed a separate affiliated investment unit to raise capital from third-party investors. It received a EUR60 million ($74 million) seed investment and has so far raised EUR110 million towards a target of EUR200 million. Most of the investors are foundations and family offices with experience in philanthropy.

Double Impact and Rise succeeded in winning commitments from the likes of pension funds and sovereign wealth funds that previously had little or no exposure to the impact space. Rise’s LPs are said to include Washington State Investment Board, Sweden’s AP-funds, and Temasek Holdings.

Of the $114 billion held in impact investing assets as of year-end 2016, $21.8 billion was in private equity, according to the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). The institutional investor share of this capital pool is still relatively small. 

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• Topics
• GPs
• Fundraising
• Growth
• Asia
• Partners Group
• Impact investment