Miki Yokoyama, managing director of Aurum Impact, talks about the unique opportunity to drive family offices to invest into impact and what is holding them back.
Miki Yokoyama, managing director of Aurum Impact, a German impact investor, is convinced the opportunity for family offices to invest into impact remains largely untapped. This is something, she says, her firm wants to change by strengthening collaboration across the German investment ecosystem.
Yokoyama met Jan-Hendrik Goldbeck, one of the heirs to the family-run construction company Goldbeck, which he runs with his brother Jörg-Uwe Goldbeck, in 2022 when she was setting up impact venture capital (VC) firm AENU in Berlin.
She says that, at the time, she felt frustrated by the restrictions on VC investing, including the fixed investment period and return pressures. This meant having to invest disproportionately into software businesses simply because “you cannot generate the same scalability investing into hardware”. She says that investing into social impact was also more difficult because of the perception of lower financial returns.
“When I met Jan-Hendrik, we realised we shared a similar mindset and that as a family they could invest much more flexibly, take a longer term view and accept concessionary financial returns if there was a clear social or environmental return,” she says, explaining that he and his two brothers – a third brother Joachim Goldbeck runs the solar business Goldbeck Solar – decided to set up Aurum Impact in 2023, as a complementary business to their existing family office.
The Goldbeck family also already ran a foundation so the motivation for the brothers was that this would allow them to take more responsibility for their wealth by backing solutions-driven entrepreneurial businesses and funds.
“They were keen to put more money into impact investing but they also, specifically, wanted to pioneer investments that were really impact-first rather than only investing for impact if it delivered the same returns as traditional investments.”
Challenges facing family offices
Yokoyama articulates Aurum Impact’s mission as aspiring to encourage “a greater number of families to allocate more capital towards impact topics.”
According to her, one of the problems preventing family office investment into impact at scale is the belief held by banks and wealth management companies in Germany that there is not enough demand.
“We have also found that what they do offer in terms of impact falls short of what a family office would want or need,” she adds, explaining that a common frustration among members of family offices is the lack of “professional and authentic” impact investment advisory firms they can turn to with their investments.
Yokoyama says the next generation of entrepreneurial families are also often in full time jobs unrelated to the financial industry, creating a mismatch between them and the people…
Read More: Aurum Impact on a mission to galvanise the family office sector around
