New Platform Addresses 'Intention-Action' Gap for Impact-Driven ESG Investors

by Startacus Admin

GOODFOLIO launches aiming to help investors build good portfolios that work for people, planet, and prosperity.

A simple, transparent, and customised investment platform which enables DIY investors to back companies and industries that share their ethical values has just been launched.

Inspired by the thought of overcoming the unreasonable difficulty of making values-driven investment decisions and implementing these, GOODFOLIO was conceived to help investors manage this challenge. Having developed in-house tools to efficiently scan and scrutinise investments for more effective alignment with values and preferences, GOODFOLIO is now onboarding clients.

Global ESG and impact funds are forecast to reach $55 trillion in value by 2025, growing at 40% per year in Europe. However, while a UK study revealed that 77% of people with over £25K in investable assets would choose sustainable investments, only 13% have actually done so.

GOODFOLIO was created to help overcome this intention-action gap and increase the flow of capital into impactful investments. It does this by providing values-driven investors with essential data, including categorised lists of ESG funds with meaningful insights and an ability to search and compare different offerings. GOODFOLIO enables users to channel their assets into funds that are aligned with their values, focusing on core areas that matter to them such as gender, climate, health, and water. This targeting of impactful capital can send a powerful signal to businesses to change their behaviour for attracting capital.

With regulatory permissions secured, GOODFOLIO empowers investors to build and manage Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) compliant and impact-driven investment portfolios that work for the benefit of people, planet, and prosperity.

Another benefit GOODFOLIO users enjoy is the low and transparent pricing structure where they are charged an all-in fee of 0.45% for the first £50,000 invested through the platform and 0.35% for anything above. Compared with IFA, or legacy investment platforms like Hargreaves Lansdown that charge per transaction, it can be significantly more cost-effective.

The London-based company behind the platform raised £160K in pre-seed funding last year and since that time has built a high-valued waiting list with around £30m of investable assets. While catering to the UK B2C investment market and increasing its impact-driven financial products and tools, the long-term vision of GOODFOLIO is to target pension providers and investment managers within the B2B market.

The company is now seeking to raise a further six figure sum through crowdfunding and is also planning an institutional investment round in 2023.

GOODFOLIO was founded by its CEO Omid Pakseresht, an Oxford-educated entrepreneur with a successful track record in finance and technology product commercialisation, and his brother and Chief Technical Officer, Nima Pakseresht, a computer science technology leader with more than 15 years of experience in big data, AI and ML. The senior management team includes Harvard-educated social entrepreneur Farahnaz Karim, who serves as GOODFOLIO’s Chief Impact Officer.

Among the company’s board of advisors are Bob Noyen, an institutional investment expert whose long career in Finance includes taking a boutique UK based asset management firm through to IPO and making the firm one of the first in Finance to become Carbon Neutral, and Steven Hamblin, an angel investor and technology leader who built one of the first AI teams at Babylon Health.

CEO Omid Pakseresht comments: ‘After extensive work in developing our platform and crossing the regulatory milestone, we are now delighted to launch GOODFOLIO to support the UK’s growing, engaged and vibrant community of values-driven investors who want more control over what their capital does.

A majority of UK investors want to consider ESG factors but there is currently no effective investment platform to present clear and concise data at the point of decision making and provide tools for how investments can be aligned to values. With GOODFOLIO, we address that issue by making it easy for users to invest, as well as manage and monitor the social and environmental impact of their portfolio via intuitive reports and tools.

Led by demand from investors, and the sheer need to build a better world, we believe that impact-driven investments will eventually become the norm. GOODFOLIO is doing its part to get us there, and we are doing this with a fairer, transparent and cost-effective fee structure.

Through our crowdfunding round we aim to grow GOODFOLIO’s presence in the UK market by bolstering our team and investing in further product development, marketing and customer acquisition.’

 

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• #environmental

Published on: 18th July 2022