Impak Finance

Impak Finance is an impact Credit rating agency based in Montreal, Canada with offices in Ottawa and Paris, France. The company assesses and rates the Human impact on the social and environmental impact of companies and portfolios thanks to its impact methodology, called IS2, which is based on the Sustainable Development Goals and the Impact Management Project norms, among others. impak Finance was co-founded in 2016 by Canadian, Paul Allard, now CEO, and French, Tima Gros, now COO. The impact rating agency was launched in February 2019 becoming the main business line.
== Mission ==
impak Finance is a purpose-driven company that developed its scoring solution around its mission: “to channel capital towards businesses with a positive social or environmental impact.” “to trigger traditional businesses’ potential of transformation and use the impact assessment as an incentive to truly mitigate their negative impacts and create positive ones.”
== Impact approach ==
In the Environmental finance field, there are many ways to measure a company’s performance on social and environmental aspects in order to Investment, the Environmental, social and corporate governance criteria (ESG) and Socially responsible investing (SRI) being one of them. impak Finance stands by the impact approach which focuses on both the generation of positive impacts, and the Environmental mitigation|mitigation of negative impacts and Outcomes theory|outcomes of a company’s activities. In comparison, the ESG approach focuses on the mitigation of negative impacts and on the company’s efforts.
The impact approach is based on the concepts of intentionality, additionality, and measurability. Intentionality refers to the acknowledgment of intending to generate or create environmental and social impact. Additionality is the perspective of a company’s environmental and social value increase that would not have occurred otherwise. Finally, measurability is the tracking of all outcomes, financial returns, and environmental and social impacts.
== Impact ratings ==
impak Finance has launched its first benchmark index, the impak French40, in February 2020. This index ranks the impak ScoreTM of the top 80% of companies of France’s flagship index, the CAC 40.
== Impact statement and impak score ==
impak Finance mentions that it coined the term ‘impact statement’ in 2019 as follows: "the impact statement is analogous to the financial statement but for impact. It is a common reporting framework for extra-financial data based on universal and prevalent standards (IMP, List of Sustainable Development Goal targets and indicators|SDGs) similar to International Financial Reporting Standards".
Along with the impact statement which comprises both qualitative and quantitative environmental and social data, impak Finance issues the impak ScoreTM of the company. This impak ScoreTM out of 1,000 is the sum of 3 sub-scores, namely the positive impact score out of 500, the negative impact mitigation score out of 300 and the governance score out of 200.
== Controversy ==
In May 2021, impak Finance announced that it was withdrawing the impak Coin from its financial statement. The impak Coin (MPK) is a cryptocurrency developed by impak Finance for its B2C business line in 2017, in accordance with the Quebec Autorité des marchés financiers (Quebec)|Autorité des marchés financiers. The withdrawal also meant the end of the B2C project, a responsible consumption mobile application. In late May, the Quebec newspaper, Le Journal de Montréal|Journal de Montréal, published an article on the news quoting impak Finance: “Unfortunately, there will be no refund for amounts invested in the MPKs”. It also mentions that a number of local celebrities participated in the promotion of the impak Coin, and wonders where all the millions went.
In June, another article in the Journal de Montréal was published on the subject, stating that “2266 small investors [...] have seen their money disappear” and that the AMF does not wish to take actions since “the risks surrounding impak Finance’s project were identified and known to the investors”. 
Category:Credit rating agencies