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I was intrigued to read the new report...

..."Faith Aligned Impact Finance Project" from Oxford Saïd Business School, with peripheral contributions by FaithInvest, for their faith market sizing exercise: Microsoft Word - OxFAIF Phase 1 Report 2022.docx

A bold attempt and helpful to see the scale and scope of investment activity across faiths, but unfortunately muddled results, as it blends retail, institutional, family assets and other types of assets without distinctions, and somewhat blurry applications of their “sustainable investment categories” (page 12) to classifying assets by type. The case studies are interesting but include no traditional faith-based asset owners.

There is some useful / interesting data:

  • Page 22 - Islamic assets overview – with good color on sovereign wealth funds

  • Page 31 - Dharmic Assets - with interesting data on the size and role of gold holdings by Hindu temples - and page 113 - Hindu endowments and foundations

  • Page 112 – Jewish funds, endowments and foundations

Tidbit: the authors catalogued 54 academic papers on faith-consistent investing, 20 of them focused on Islam. Their reasoning? "Studies into the performance of Islamic investing, given its scale and distinct differences in investment philosophy, have made it the leading source on scholarly data on the performance of faith-aligned investment."

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