In piloting the creation of a financial index for social impact investing, EngagedX created the EngagedX Investment STandards. These standards were developed to overcome a current shortcoming in the market, which is that social impact investment data is inconsistently collected, stored and reported. This means that they cannot easily be aggregated and therefore like-for-like comparison is very difficult, if not impossible.
In 2013 EngagedX convened a steering committee with industry leaders, primarily in the UK but also internationally, to establish a common understanding for how to report social impact investment data. This culminated in the EngagedX Investment STandards (EXIST), published as a free market resource under Creative Commons licence.
The UK Government and Big Society Capital use the EXIST framework as a basis for capturing data. The OECD featured the EXIST framework as a casetudy in their report to the G8. As an industry framework, EXIST makes it possible to collect, categorise and compare transactions according to a number of characteristics, including product type, risk banding, sectors (as used by both social sector and mainstream practitioners), investor and investee characteristics as well as the nature of social outcomes.
The latest version of the standards are available for download here:
EngagedX is currently evolving this set of standards into an XML schema and semantic language for communicating both social impact data and financial performance data.
The EngagedX Investment STandards (EXIST) © 2013 Engaged Investment Ltd have been made available for using, sharing, copying, distributing and transmitting under the Creative Commons license ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported’ (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en.
The EngagedX Investment STandards (EXIST) will be kept up to date and republished from time to time by Engaged Investment Ltd, requests for amendments should be submitted to exist@engagedx.com