所谓的“影响投资”区分自己，因为他们声称包装积极的社会影响。但是，索赔乞求问题：任何人都可以确认或量化影响吗？GIIR背后的人代表着全球影响投资评级系统正在努力。他们正在建立像穆迪评级机构的社会影响的过程中。
事实上，穆迪是少数主要的机构之一，参与了Giirs的建议或资助（发音为“齿轮”）努力。与穆迪一起，美国银行和摩根大通的代表参加了一个咨询委员会，帮助指导项目的发展，德勤，普通和美国公开，并获得了主要投资者。
帮助拓宽对冲击投资的兴趣是去年11月发布的报告，摩根大通和洛克菲勒基金会称为“影响投资：新兴资产类别”。该报告的作者估计，在未来十年，仅限五个选定的影响投资中的增长将产生1830亿美元和66.7亿美元的利润，并吸引400亿美元至1万亿美元之间的集体投资。
但是，在影响投资之前需要解决充足的挑战，被作为机构投资者的主流资产课程。亚博赞助欧冠Giirs成立以解决最基本的最基本之一：将可信度和结构借给新兴的投资空间。
“This is something that can help define an asset class in terms of what does count as an impact investment and what doesn’t,” says Beth Richardson, director of GIIRS. “There’s no use in just letting companies tell their own stories, because they can always just tell the piece of the story they want, and not disclose the rest.”
GIIRS, a wholly owned subsidiary of Berwyn, Pennsylvania-based non-profit B Lab, is currently in the process of beta-testing its rating system. This involves on-site visits to 200 social entrepreneurs sprinkled across North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia to gather feedback about the relevance and appropriateness of the impact assessment.
Giirs的预计公开发布于今年7月，一旦该项目是公共公司或投资基金，任何公司或投资基金都可以要求拥有Giirs的社会影响（在目前的测试版测试中，Giirs仅评估200所预先的200家公司- 用于研究阶段）。
在某些方面，该项目符合日益增长的努力，将投资和公司业务与环境和社区的影响联系起来。像全球报告倡议和国际综合报告委员会这样的组织也集中于投资者确定这些类型的联系。但这些举措侧重于改善公开上市公司的报告;理查森说，GIIRS是第一个跨部门，在私人空间中这样做的交叉地理努力。
与私人股本和ventu的喜欢re capital funds – and the private companies they invest in – creates some challenges that the organizations focusing primarily on the public markets don’t have to face in quite the same way. Despite B Lab’s and GIIRS’ strong advocacy of transparency in the investing and corporate worlds, the project has had to strike a careful balance between transparency and the opacity insisted upon by the private funds and companies providing it with information.
“It’s a different market than the public market,” says Richardson. “There’s no way to get the information without companies’ and funds’ participation, and so we need to respect their boundaries as far as their willingness to provide that information. We’ve had feedback from companies and funds that they’d be hesitant to share information if they were required to publicly disclose it, and we didn’t want that to be a barrier to adoption.”
公开发布后，所有额定公司和资金将在GIIRS网站上市，但更深入，更详细的信息，如实际评级，只会全面披露给定公司或基金的投资者。
Richardson表示，Giirs团队认识到扩大和吸引对影响投资的主流利益可能需要一些证明它是它是一个可以在财务方面胜过的资产类别，而不仅仅是慈善者。GIIR，旨在保持纯粹关注投资的社会影响，将留出那种辩论，但Richardson表示，这是团队希望其他人将解决的话题。
Giirs已经招募了Duke University的社会企业家精神（案例）的进步中心，以帮助促进学术界在研究影响投资财务回报答复的问题方面的利益。案例于3月举行了两个网络研讨会，向感兴趣的研究人员介绍Giirs数据。
In other ways, too, larger networks of interest will have to form across the investment industry landscape before GIIRS can scale up, says Richardson. Again, because GIIRS focuses on private entities, companies and funds will only ever be rated of their own volition. But that doesn’t mean that incentives couldn’t start to emerge to encourage reticent funds and companies to do so.
“It’s all dependent upon investors,” says Richardson. “I don’t think you’d be able to do what the public markets have done, which is kind of provide ratings for a broad swath of companies without their participation. But if investors are requiring their funds to be rated, and funds in turn are requiring their portfolio companies to be rated, you have the potential for a broader audience to have gone through this process. So an important component of GIIRS is making sure we’re reaching out to institutional investors and helping them understand why this could be valuable to them.”