I was recently joined by Brian Fairhurst, Head of Product in Business Development at Newday Impact Investing, for another episode of “The Impact” on FinTech TV. We discussed how Newday is bringing impact investing strategies to private markets, and how the private credit world is saturated with mid market direct lending strategies.
Jeff Gitterman: Hi, and welcome to “The Impact” on FinTech TV. I’m your host, Jeff Gitterman. Today I am joined by Brian Fairhurst, Head of Product in Business Development at Newday Impact Investing. He’s also a general partner on the Prime Meridian Newday Impact Lending Fund. Brian, thanks for joining me today.
Brian Fairhurst: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. It’s great to see you again. … It’s been so long, it was well before COVID, so it feels like a lifetime ago.
Gitterman: Yeah. So we always like to start by at least finding out what led people onto the path of impact from the traditional finance world. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and your journey to Prime?
Fairhurst: Absolutely. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher for me too. One of the things I realized in the past decade is that every investment has an impact, whether you’re aware of it, whether it’s positive, neutral, or negative.
So what drew me to impact investing was that acknowledgment of the throughput of your dollars and understanding the output and to the extent you want to have a positive impact. It’s and intentionality. It’s an alignment of those interests. And secondarily, it’s very personal to me. I actually grew up in a woman head of household family who was a small business owner. Didn’t start out that way. My family was very traditional. My dad was an Air Force fighter pilot and, Vietnam veteran, but he died when I was 12, putting my mom who had been a stay-at-home mom for 15 years in this horrible financial situation of being the breadwinner, with no recent job skills, paying the mortgage.
She started a small business to fund our ability to live. But it was lean and I didn’t really even appreciate at that age how tight things were. But we were very fortunate. There were safety nets with programs like veterans benefits, and we had a home, we had equity that my mom could borrow against to fund a growing family, and frankly, probably the most expensive years with growing teenage boys and all the food we were eating.
So it just always put an appreciation in my mind for the fact that we were very lucky, that many families don’t go through circumstances like that and come out as well as we did and many fall through the safety nets.
Gitterman: So tell me how you took this passion and energy for this issue and brought it into the strategy that you help run.
Fairhurst: So I met Doug Heske and the Newday team about eight years ago. They were actually a client of mine at my former firm. We managed a sub-advised ESG equity strategy for them. And as I got to know Newday’s platform, their motto is “Get Informed, Get Involved, and Get Invested.” And I just liked the holistic approach. And they were hyper-focused on listed markets.
So what I wanted to do when I came on board this year was build out strategies in private markets, where I think there’s a lot more room for innovation. You’ve got more idiosyncratic risk, you’ve got less transparency. So there’s more of a justification for an active approach. And I do believe in the private markets you can have a lot more tangible direct impact. So that alignment of private markets and catalytic impact was really important for me.
To catch the full conversation, you can watch my interview with Brian Fairhurst.
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