NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

It’s no secret impact investing is mainstreaming quickly, with large, commercial investors like Zurich, Blackrock, and UBS taking significant strides. Yet the question remains: just how rapidly is the market changing, and what are the implications?

Amid all the noise about impact investing it can be difficult to get a clear read on what counts as fact or fiction. Yet each year the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) makes a critical contribution in the form of its comprehensive investor survey.

As a headline number indicative of mainstreaming, 59 percent of impact investors reported targeting market-rate financial returns in the 2016 survey, up from 54 percent in 2014.

However, there are a number of other findings that may be more predictive of the accelerating pace of commercialization.

The first relates to the experience of fund managers in impact investing.