Mission Markets in Ashoka Changemakers blog and Wired Magazine
Mission Markets was featured in an "Idea exChange" blog post written by Ashoka's Changemakers program. The post was entitled "SOCAP10 Recap: Woodstock for Social Entrepreneurs". According to their recap, the conference "reverberated as a call to action to technology and investment infrastructures that heretofore have glossed over the practice of impact investing", and Mike Van Patten was quoted in the post. To read the full recap click here.
We were also featured in the October edition of Wired Magazine in an article entitled "The New Green Economy". The article looks at programs that assign economic value to nature and discusses the fragmentation of the space as a whole. Here is a section of the article:
"That's what Michael Van Patten hopes to change. In a small loft on Manhattan's Hudson Street, just west of SoHo, Van Patten presides over an office so new there's nothing adorning its white walls. In early spring, the view was of a construction site across the street, where a large building was being demolished. But though he'd been working in the space for a month, Van Patten hadn't even noticed the project. He had other things on his mind, namely the impending soft launch of Mission Markets, his investment platform for social and environmental markets. A former bond trader, Van Patten has spent the past two years positioning himself as the consummate expert on the "markets" portion of ecosystem markets. 'We're trying to make it easier for investors to identify what these projects are,' he says.
Environmental markets are about more than just equity and debt. 'They have values that investors care about,' says David Meyers, Mission Markets' COO and a biological anthropologist who spent years working on conservation projects in Madagascar before earning an MBA from Yale. 'People are fed up with investing with no morals.'
Mission Markets, the first company of its kind, hopes to make environmental investing "more liquid and less fragmented" by turning ecosystem services into asset classes, just like stocks or bonds. A private platform will help match accredited investors with companies seeking capital for conservation projects. An open-access platform will enable anyone to invest in various types of credits, bonds and offsets, from the simple to the overwhelmingly complex.
Still, finding companies looking for investors is the easy part. 'We have 90-plus issuers that have expressed interest, and we haven't done any marketing yet,' van Patten says, 'The difficult part is getting people to invest. One of the biggest challenges is to teach people and these markets.'"
Click here to read the full article.
-The Mission Markets Team
Mission Markets operates a private investment exchange facilitating transactions within the social and environmental capital markets. The Mission Markets platform provides companies and organizations with access to funding and impact investors an efficient way to evaluate, invest in and monitor sustainable investment opportunities.
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