Different Shades of Green: how different investment strategies add impact to the risk-return perspective

Insights from the BFF Panel 2025 based on multiple real-world cases in the social and environmental sector, illustrating the different strategies for positive impact.

Moderated by Pierre Harkay, CEO of Impact Finance Belgium, the panel explored complementary strategies across the capital spectrum — from institutional investment and infrastructure to private equity and early-stage impact finance. The discussion highlighted the convergence of financial performance and societal value, and the importance of thoughtful, credible, and data-driven approaches to avoid greenwashing and ensure long-term accountability.

For this panel, we gained valuable insights from Wim Vermeir, François de Borchgrave, and Filip Pintelon — each bringing a unique perspective on sustainable and impact investing:

• François de Borchgrave : Managing Partner at KOIS, leads the €150 million Impact Expansion fund,
• Wim Vermeir : Chief Investment Officer at AG Insurance and Group Head of Investments at Ageas, responsible for the management of a portfolio of 73 bn €.
• Filip Pintelon : Partner at Capricorn Partners, heads the €51 million HealthTech Fund

Together, these three voices offered a compelling narrative on how capital, when guided by purpose and performance, can drive long-term, scalable change.

Why Impact? The Investment Rationale Behind the Mission

Pierre opened the session by contextualizing the discussion within broader economic and geopolitical shifts. Citing insights from earlier sessions, he noted that investors today are increasingly being called to go beyond traditional ESG frameworks. “Sustainability is about more than just green,” he said. “It’s about aligning innovation, risk, and value creation — and that’s where impact becomes a key driver.”

The three investment leaders — Wim Vermeir, François de Borchgrave, and Filip Pintelon — each reflected the growing need for financial models that go beyond returns, integrating long-term societal and environmental value creation. Together, their approaches highlighted the complementarity of institutional investing, private equity, and venture capital in delivering scalable impact.

Wim Vermeir emphasized the long-term perspective of institutional investors like AG Insurance, where sustainable investing is both a financial strategy and a responsibility. By integrating ESG criteria into financial analysis, AG identifies future-proof investments with lower risk profiles and stronger long-term potential.

François de Borchgrave shared how KOIS’s Impact Expansion fund, a EUR 150 million impact private equity fund, invests in Western European growth companies in the sectors of health, education and the environment. Impact Expansion invests in companies that demonstrate that they have a social or environmental impact through the products or services, they bring to market. Each portfolio company is assigned 3 to 5 specific impact KPIs, demonstrating the outcome generated by their core products or services. This has been done on top of ambitious financial targets (20% IRR), aiming to match traditional private equity top quartile performances.

Filip Pintelon, leading Capricorn Partners’ HealthTech Fund, offered a healthcare-specific lens. He outlined that their multi-decade experience of investing in healthtech has taught them that by targeting impact, they realize better investment journeys, with better results also for investors. They are aligning their vision on ‘value based healthcare’, a transformative approach to healthcare, seeking to restructure healthcare systems with a focus on creating value for patients while considering the costs to produce these outcomes. In this approach, the value for other healthcare stakeholders, like doctors, clinicians, hospitals, and health insurance systems is considered too and is a way to create positive momentum with all parties necessary to deliver superior value and care for patients.

Translating Purpose into Practice: Diverse Strategies for positive impact

After exploring the "why" of impact investing, the panel shifted focus to the “how” — uncovering the concrete strategies each investor applies to deliver measurable social and environmental results. The approaches shared by the speakers demonstrated how impact can be embedded across different asset classes, from large-scale infrastructure to growth-stage companies and early-stage innovation.

Wim Vermeir illustrated AG Insurance’s institutional commitment through a €4 billion infrastructure portfolio. This portfolio consists of investments in renewables, public transport, the digital transition and social infrastructure. A standout example is the Schools of Tomorrow initiative, which financed and constructed 182 schools across Flanders. Beyond addressing the need for high-quality education infrastructure, the project integrated environmental solutions such as solar panels, passive school design, and geothermal energy — while also making sports facilities available to local communities. AG's recent investment in a 600 MWh battery park by Luminus further reinforces its focus on grid stability and the next phase of the renewable energy transition.

At the growth equity level, François de Borchgrave shared how KOIS’s Impact Expansion Fund invests in companies where impact and financial performance go hand in hand.

The more the company grows, the more impact it has, the more financial results it generates. He cited Auticon, a German company that employs people with autism in the IT sector (85% have PhD’s, 80% were without a job before becoming employed ta Auticon). With over 500 employees across 15 countries and €35 million in sales, Auticon proves that socially driven companies can grow at pace and deliver strong returns — in this case, a fourfold return on investment (as part of a 21% IRR across the portfolio over a decade.

Filip Pintelon, focusing on early-stage healthcare innovation, emphasized the importance of financing transformative healthcare startups – a space where it is particularly difficult for starters to secure the necessary financing. Many of the fund investors (like PMV and Ageas) have themselves an ambition and concrete goals to create societal impact. Such cornerstone investors enable the creation of such healthtech fund, which can on their turn enable healthtech startups. It is like a chain of impact investing – from LP to fund, from fund to portfolio company – and at each chain link additional leverage is created. Their past investment successes and failures have convinced them that this is the best path to create sustainable, and scalable innovation in healthcare, and ultimately also drive superior investment returns in a domain that has been notoriously challenging and unpredictable for investors.

Making Impact Real: Guarding Against Greenwashing and Greenhushing

As the momentum around sustainable finance continues to grow, so does the scrutiny. In this part of the panel, the speakers explored how to ensure that impact remains meaningful, measurable, and credible — and how to avoid the growing risks of greenwashing and greenhushing. Moderator Pierre Harkay sets the stage by referring to current pressures on the EU sustainable finance framework (SFDR, CSRD, CSDDD), and highlighted the recent ECB warning that sustainability reporting must strike "the right balance" — being both realistic and value-adding for investors and investees alike.

François de Borchgrave shared how KOIS’s Impact Expansion Fund embeds rigor into its process. For every investment, the fund defines 3 to 5 outcome KPIs, validated by an external committee that can call on subject-matter experts. Importantly, 50% of the investment team’s carried interest is tied to the achievement of these KPIs — a mechanism that ensures impact is treated with the same seriousness as financial performance. “We manage the impact component in a portfolio company just like we manage the financial dimension,” François emphasized, underscoring KOIS's belief that accountability is essential to integrity.

Wim Vermeir offered a broader institutional perspective, noting that sustainable and responsible investing are often divided into three categories: Responsible investing, Sustainable Investing, and Impact investing. The three categories overlap; most investments combine characteristics of all three. Moreover, the three categories are complementary.

Responsible Investing with its limited restrictions on the investment universe, could be applied in principle on all investment portfolios. Sustainable Investing, with its balanced combination of financial returns and positive impact on society, makes sense for long-term investors like insurance companies and pension funds, as well for a significant number of retail investors. Impact Investing with its focus on non-financial impact objectives and often higher risk exposure to less liquid and less mainstream instruments, will remain a much smaller niche for a part of the portfolio of engaged investors. But at the same time Impact Investing can also act as a laboratory for start-up investments, that once they become more mature and scalable, will evolve towards the category of Sustainable Investing. In that sense, it is important to focus not only to the strict scope of pure Impact Investing – and also consider the merits and the impact of Sustainable and Responsible investing.

Filip Pintelon highlighted that Capricorn’s HealthTech Fund has developed a tool allowing them quickly to assess outcome improvements across stakeholders, and associated implementation costs, and calculate an ‘outcome versus cost’ metric that guides our investment decisions in startup companies that aim to transform healthcare.

Looking Ahead: Evolving Priorities and the Future of Impact Investing

As the panel turned toward the future, the discussion centered on the evolving relevance of impact investing amid growing geopolitical and economic uncertainty. Far from being a passing trend, the speakers agreed that investing with positive impact is becoming more critical than ever — not only as a response to societal and environmental challenges, but as a strategic driver of long-term resilience and innovation.

Filip Pintelon made the case that in healthcare, impact is no longer a secondary concern — it is the value proposition. Drawing from Capricorn’s experience in healthtech, he argued that future healthcare systems will increasingly be built around outcome-based models, where value is defined by measurable improvements in patient health and system efficiency. In such a framework, startups that can quantify and deliver meaningful outcomes will attract capital not in spite of their impact focus, but because of it.

When asked about future shifts likely to redefine the space, François de Borchgrave and Wim Vermeir both pointed to structural changes in how impact is measured and integrated. François highlighted the growing alignment between financial incentives and impact outcomes, citing innovations such as performance-linked carried interest and more standardized KPI validation as signs of a maturing market. Wim emphasized the importance of standardization in ESG and impact reporting — a shift that could enable investors at scale to assess sustainability data with greater confidence, precision, and relevance.

Looking 3 to 5 years ahead, the panel noted that the greatest opportunities for capital to drive impact without sacrificing returns may lie in sectors where systemic transformation is already underway — such as climate infrastructure, health innovation, and education — provided that impact continues to be embedded with clarity, consistency, and conviction.

Conclusion: Impact Still Matters

As the panel wrapped up, a unifying message emerged: Impact investing a necessary evolution of capital markets. It aligns long-term thinking with societal progress, offers new levers for innovation, and increasingly, delivers competitive returns. While challenges like regulatory complexity, data credibility, and impact verification remain, the momentum is clear. Whether through infrastructure, social entrepreneurship, or health innovation, capital that prioritizes both purpose and performance is shaping a more resilient financial future.

And in the words of Pierre, “This is not just an investment trend — it’s a shared responsibility.”