Why this program?

• Small businesses are at risk of losing out on large contracts, and investment, if they do not report on their ESG performance.
• The proportion of major organizations that require their small business suppliers to disclose ESG data is expected to reach 92% in 2024.
• Adopting ESG leads to new business opportunities (50%), makes it easier to recruit and retain employees (32%) and improves access to financing and investment (31%) and can provide the insights and learnings on the real impact of small businesses and opportunities for improvement.
• However, current ESG and sustainability data solutions are not tailored or accessible/affordable for small businesses, particularly the Global South, require large amounts of data reporting, and most critically existing platforms focus on inward risks to a company or climate only – not quantifying actual social impact of companies and their activities on society.

Program overview

This program is aimed at designing and testing a solution for empowering small businesses, drawing on Vested Impact’s award-winning data-driven impact measurement platform, their existing technical architecture, and their strong relationships with financial institutions, regulators, and small businesses. Through this program, they will develop and launch a small business portal for automated impact assessment of micro- and small businesses, particularly small businesses in EMEA and Latin America. The portal will include an AI-powered feature for summarizing complex impact data, and a shareable sustainability reporting link to allow small businesses to share evidence and communicate sustainable business practices, and position themselves in the market to investors and clients.

Vested Impact currently assesses the impact of over 25,000 capital market companies for financial institutions, and over 250 small businesses for asset managers. This grant through the second Mastercard Strive Innovation Fund will enable Vested Impact to scale access to being able to provide automated, accessible, and cost-effective impact assessment on ~1.2M small businesses; leveraging over 300 million science-based impact data points to assess impact of the business in seconds and to make the data available to the businesses in shareable reports to enable market access, investment, compliance and improving their sustainability and impact on people and planet.

About Vested Impact

Vested Impact is an award-winning platform that automatically assesses and quantifies the positive and negative effects of companies' products, services and activities on people and the planet. Vested Impact leverages more than 300 million science-based and impact data points to assess and quantify the impact of companies, helping organizations such as the UN, financial leaders, and companies measure what truly matters: impact.