Impact Finance Lab
While the financial sector has the potential to generate a positive impact, numerous unresolved issues and important knowledge gaps remain in the practical implementation. The Impact Finance Lab fosters collaboration between academics and practitioners, developing innovative and practical solutions, advancing research and providing education.
What is impact finance?
Impact finance aims to actively create positive, real-world change. This contrasts sharply with traditional sustainable finance, which often emphasizes risk management and harm avoidance. Impact finance can take multiple forms – including stewardship approaches in public equity, start-up or growth financing in private markets, structuring of sustainable bonds and other impact-linked instruments, and blended finance – and can be applied across a wide range of sectors and themes.
Why the need for the impact finance lab?
The transition toward a sustainable economy requires financial mechanisms that go beyond traditional sustainable finance with its focus on risk mitigation and ESG compliance. So while impact-oriented investors can profit from the rapid expansion of sustainable finance over the past decade, a substantial gap persists between sustainability integration as a risk-management exercise and the need for capital allocation strategies that advance environmental and social outcomes.
Our Impact Finance Lab aims to bridge this gap — by generating evidence on how finance contributes to tangible social and environmental outcomes, developing innovative financing models that incentivize transformation, and fostering collaboration between academia, policymakers, and practitioners.
Our lab provides:
- Research on the underlying mechanisms and effectiveness of impact-oriented financial instruments.
- Testing grounds for innovative financial structures.
- Workshops to ensure knowledge transfer and exchange among practitioners and academics.
- Guidance for regulators and market actors on integrating impact into financial decision-making.
- Education for financial market participants.
Executive education
Seminar “Impact Finance – Climate Transition”
Other planned modules cover the following topics:
- Impact Finance – Real Estate
- Impact Finance – Social Impact and Financial Inclusion
- Impact Finance – Nature and Biodiversity
- Impact Finance – Debt Financing.
Workshops
On May 5, 2025, the first workshop took place as part of the ZHAW Impact Finance Lab. With over 20 selected representatives from pension funds, banks, impact finance providers, SwissBanking, the FOEN, and other relevant stakeholders, our experts Julia Meyer, Dominik Boos, and Beat Affolter discussed these and other questions:
- Is a convincing theory of change more relevant than measuring the actual impact achieved?
- Are the mechanisms of exclusion strategies more promising than the traditional cost of capital channel in terms of their signaling effect on other investors and customers?
- How important are credible motives and a convincing business case for the effectiveness of stewardship strategies?
- Is stewardship effectively an excuse for avoiding exclusions?
- What are the negative attributes of blended finance vehicles from the perspective of institutional investors?
- How can the different mindsets of impact finance providers and pension funds be reconciled?
A summary of the key insights is provided here (in German). (PDF 189 kB)
Projects
New tool for determining sustainability preferences
How can investors' sustainability preferences be accurately assessed? A project by the ZHAW School of Management and Law on behalf of the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) has developed a digital preference survey tool for this purpose.
A key problem with previous practical tools is that they measure sustainability preferences in isolation from financial characteristics. The new tool addresses this issue by measuring sustainability preferences in conjunction with traditional investment characteristics, thereby revealing the compromises that investors are actually willing to make.
Link to the tool:
Through structured and quantitative data collection, the tool improves the quality of advice, increases the fit between customer expectations and investment products, and at the same time reduces the risks of misadvice and greenwashing. The prototype thus makes a significant contribution to investor protection and the credibility of sustainable financial markets.
Further results and methodological background information can be found in the white paper.
People involved in the project:
Sugandhita Sugandhita
Institut für Financial Management
Michaela Tanner
Institut für Wealth & Asset Management
Prof. Dr. Julia Meyer
Institut für Financial Management
People
Prof. Dr. Julia Meyer’s research work focuses on the question of how the impact and sustainability of companies and products can be quantified to their best advantage. Current projects include the detailed analysis of the information content of sustainability ratings of different providers and the question whether sustainable companies show resilience in a global crisis. Julia Meyer is your contact for in-house sustainability training.
Dr. Dominik Boos is a senior lecturer at the Center for Asset Management. He has been designing and implementing investment and risk processes for over 20 years. In doing so, he combines qualitative assessments with quantitative analyses. He first became involved in sustainable investing as an investment strategist at the Swiss National Bank. Today, he is the head of the CAS in Sustainable Investing program and a module coordinator for the MSc in Sustainable Investments program.
Prof. Dr. Beat Affolter heads the Center for Corporate Performance & Sustainable Financing at the Institute for Financial Management. In his research activities, he is primarily concerned with sustainable corporate financing. Current projects include improving the financing of fair-trade producers, sustainability in the credit sector and quantifying sustainable financing policies.