Public Equities Impact Investing at BlackRock

By: Michael Norris and Shawn Cole and Vikram Gandhi and John Masko

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Synopsis: In early 2021, BlackRock-the world's largest asset manager with $9 trillion in assets under management (AUM)-sought to become a leader in promoting environmental and social sustainability. Over the previous ten years, CEO Larry Fink had written an annual open letter to CEOs, pushing them to view sustainability and climate change planning key components of any long-term strategy. He had built an investment stewardship committee to attend portfolio company shareholder meetings and implement these goals. He had also recruited a team of prominent impact investors to BlackRock to lead a new impact investing fund. Now, as the new fund came of age, both the fund's managers and BlackRock's senior leadership faced difficult choices. At the fund level, they needed to define how to implement their two main selection criteria-intentionality and additionality-in choosing the fund's next stocks. At the company level, BlackRock's leaders wrestled with the question of just how much impact BlackRock could have on the companies it invested in, when well above half of BlackRock's AUM were invested passively.