CSRwire Member Spotlight: Man with a Mission

By CSRwire Contributing Writer Jayne Flannery

Mike Van Patten, founder and CEO of Mission Markets, talks to Jayne Flannery about the company's mission to develop the nascent impact investing marketplace.

A 20-year-long career in capital markets and traditional Wall Street transactions endowed Mike Van Patten with material success, but also a deep and lingering feeling of dissatisfaction. "A long sabbatical enabled me to take an objective look at the world around me, finally creating an insight into how capital could be used to support contemporary social and environmental challenges, rather than simply moving around money for the sake of a financial return that would benefit nobody and nothing in particular," he comments.

Mission Markets, founded in 2009, is the result. The company exists to create an impact investing marketplace that dramatically increases the flow of capital for sustainable investments, which in turn generates measurable social and environmental impacts intended to improve the human condition and life on earth.

Unlike most other players in this sector, the company starts from the premise that positive financial returns do not necessarily come at the expense of positive social and environmental impact. "We are fundamentally a financial services provider and we don't believe you can appeal to the marketplace by pulling on people’s heart strings. Our starting point is that investors, whether private or institutional, seek a solid return. Our task is then to use our expertise in the traditional, social and environmental capital markets to create a transaction system and infrastructure that can be supported by clear social and environmental metrics where we can integrate third-party service providers and other industry stakeholders," he states.

"Mission Markets can best be described as a hybrid marketplace and a networking, transaction and information hub. We operate within a financial services marketplace connecting companies and organizations seeking capital with impact investors, but there are multiple other stakeholders with whom we are developing relationships."

He is convinced the lack of access to traditional financing opportunities in the impact investment sector is primarily due to inadequate standardization and the absence of a centralized marketplace to facilitate transactions and information flow.

"The industry can only grow if it has access to the right infrastructure. This means a regulated electronic transactions platform, information and communications services, data, analytics and investment management tools to facilitate private capital transactions. We also have a critical role to play in ensuring that, over time, measurement tools and third-party metrics become better defined and more standardized," he continues.

"For example, we are one of the first transaction platforms to integrate the IRIS indicators developed by the Rockefeller Foundation's Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). We also require third-party certification that demonstrates to investors an organisation's social and environmental impact."

Looking to the future, he has no doubt impact investing will become a more mainstream asset class. "It is not about good citizenship or just an opportunity to receive excellent financial return. Corporations belonging to all sectors are under extreme stakeholder and shareholder pressure to act in a more socially responsible manner and develop transparent reporting mechanisms in relationship to their social and environmental footprint."

"It is not a trend that will go away or can be reversed. Socially responsible behaviour is becoming a critical marketing tool and offers a way for corporate entities to re-engineer their identity within the stakeholder universe. In the future, corporations will be compelled to act in a manner that supports broader social and environmental objectives and we will see many more opportunities arising."

About Michael Van Patten

Prior to founding Mission Markets and Mission Markets Earth LLC, Michael Van Patten worked for over 20 years on Wall Street and has been key to the design and implementation of private placement and illiquid security transactions platforms for several companies including co-founding the highly successful NYPPEX.

He is considered a leading expert and innovator in environmental capital markets and is responsible for guiding Mission Markets' financial and technological innovation and applying it to the social and environmental capital markets.

Michael is also involved in several regional and national working groups that are developing standard metrics to measure biodiversity and habitat function and apply them to financial transactions. He possesses FINRA registrations 7, 63, 55, 24, 3.