Impact investing: a preliminary analysis of emergent primary and secondary exchange platforms

The purpose of this article is to present a brief synthesis of the impact investment market as it relates to barriers to the full development of this market. We examine some developments that have emerged to address these barriers. We include a brief overview of the impact investing field and the current landscape of social enterprises, the vast majority of which are non-profit organizations increasingly engaged in business activity. We address the lack of liquidity in this market and the need for secondary markets that enable investor exit. We present a preliminary summary of findings on a few exchange platforms – primary and secondary – that have emerged very recently to coordinate this market in several countries.