ImpactA has three main areas of focus: clean energy and renewables, sustainable mobility, and health and water.
Six or seven years ago, Ms. Miles and Isabella da Costa Mendes, founding partner and co-CEO, started talking about setting up their own private credit fund. Both held roles at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
It was partly out of "frustration that there were great deals to be done in emerging markets, but the structure of the asset management world was quite siloed, and so there weren't the right type of investors there. So, we felt there was a real gap in the market to do some great transactions, but people weren't set up right," Ms. Miles said.
Another element to the firm comes from being a women-led fund. "We do want to make sure that women are properly consulted in all aspects of project design and execution," working to ensure that projects help to improve women's lives.
The focus is on greenfield finance — financing a project from its inception — but the fund will also "be able to selectively look at brownfield projects in order to provide funding for expansion. So, if … it's an existing hospital and that could be refinanced potentially with some debt that can allow a new hospital to be built, we would look at something like that," Ms. Miles said. "But essentially we're doing greenfield infrastructure, which is financing new infrastructure from scratch, and that's why it's 100% impact in terms of the project outcome and adding that critical infrastructure capacity."
The firm's strategy is to "deliver investments in a very resilient way, generate critical impact, but also generate market returns and lending financing in a very structured way with a lot of embedded risk mitigation in our investments, and in partnership with official sector lenders that can bring us additional risk mitigation," Ms. Miles added.
On average, ImpactA will invest between $10 million and $30 million in a deal. "We won't be doing the real off-grid stuff or are less likely (to.) It'll be larger scale, more utility projects driven by the public sector," she said.
The firm will gain "a little bit of political risk insulation in more challenging markets" by engaging with the local governments for projects, and there is also a focus on lending alongside development finance institutions, Ms. Miles said.
The investment is aligned with L&G's strategy to create positive environmental and socioeconomic impact, according to a joint news release.
Ms. Miles left J.P. Morgan two years ago and was a managing director on the London emerging markets team. Ms. da Costa Mendes led structuring teams at Renaissance Capital, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan.
