Impact Alpha Partners adds to board

The budding consulting firm has added the former chief executive of Blue Orbit Asset Management and U Ethical Investors' former head of ethics and impact.

Impact Alpha Partners was founded late last year by Andrew Huang, a former senior investment manager at State Super. It offers investment research and consulting services to investors looking to generate impact and alpha through their investments.

To assist with this, Adam Randall has joined the firm as executive director, applying a quantitative lens to its research.

In addition to founding and leading Blue Orbit, which closed its doors last year, Randall has previously held senior investment roles with IFM Investors, RQI Investors (previously RealIndex) and Victorian Funds Management Corporation.

"We are thrilled to welcome an individual of Adam's calibre to apply his formidable quantitative skills in finding solutions to impact investing problems," Huang said.

Also commenting, Randall said: "I am excited to join Impact Alpha Partners in its mission by providing a quantitative lens to how impact can be better achieved with return and risk considerations. Impact investing is a quickly evolving discipline that continues to establish how impact could be integrated into investment frameworks."

"I look forward to working with Impact Alpha Partners' partners to research problems and provide solutions in the impact space."

Meantime, joining the firm's board as a non-executive director is Désirée Lucchese.

Lucchese is currently a sustainability manager at MLC Life, and previously spent more than three years as head of ethics and impact at U Ethical Investors.

Welcoming Lucchese, Huang said: "Désirée's deep and cross-disciplinary expertise, which spans environmental science and systems, climate risk evaluations, and sustainable finance frameworks will provide invaluable guidance for Impact Alpha Partners and our clients to appropriately and credibly navigate the impact investing ecosystem."

For her part, Lucchese said: "We are now at a crossroads: rising climate risks increasing the potential for hot-house disasters, versus promising technological progress in the clean economy transformation and innovations in policies and markets."

"The scale of socio-economic change and disruption for society and the natural world will require unprecedented ingenuity and business resilience. Positive change requires courage and humility, which Impact Alpha Partners will bring to this space."