Alice Chapple is an economist, chartered accountant, and the founder of Impact Value. She has spent over three decades working in sustainable finance, long before ESG became a boardroom talking point.
Alice developed the sustainable finance online course for the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership and served as its head tutor. Her work focuses on the systems, incentives, and frameworks that shape behaviour in financial markets, helping funds, institutions, and investors think more rigorously about what impact actually means, how to measure it, and how to embed it into decision-making rather than bolt it on afterwards.
In this conversation, Philippa and Alice explore what it really takes to align capital with outcomes that matter, and what responsible leadership looks like when the financial system is still pulling in the opposite direction.
In this conversation, you’ll hear about:
- How a trip to India at 17, volunteering in remote rural communities, planted the seed for a 35-year career spent chasing a single question: how do you get capital to flow where it’s needed most?
- Why the word “impact” is used in so many different ways that it has lost precision, and what the UK’s new Sustainability Disclosure Regulations have done to sharpen it
- The measurement problem: from monetising the value of a forest to tracking megawatts and litres of water, why there is no clean universal answer and why listed equity strategies make it particularly thorny
- Why the financial system keeps rewarding misaligned choices even when individuals want to do better, and the uncomfortable truth about the Magnificent Seven and what investors would have missed by avoiding them
- What Alice would change about finance if she could wave a magic wand, and why embedding social and environmental value into financial models is harder than it sounds
- The two things CEOs who genuinely want to do the right thing consistently underestimate, and why the consumer behaviour data is more complicated than the surveys suggest
- What the Global Good Awards looks for when separating real-world impact from a compelling story, including what Paradigm Norton was recognised for and why Alice sees it as a system-changing piece of work
- Why 82% of people say they want their money to do good, but what happens when they follow them into the supermarket
- Her advice for young people entering finance who want their career to mean something, including why working on individual funds and pushing for system change are not either/or choices
Key takeaway
The financial system is not designed to be cruel. It is designed around short-term returns, and those two things have quietly become the same problem. Alice Chapple has spent 35 years working on the gap between what capital could do and what it actually does. The conversation she is most interested in is not whether impact investing works. It is why the default option is still so rarely set to good.
Find out how to enter the Global Good Awards 2026.
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The following podcast is intended to be of a general nature, will not be suitable for everyone, and should not be treated as a specific recommendation. We recommend taking professional advice before entering into any obligation or transaction.
Investing places your capital at risk. The value of investments can go down as well as up, and you may not get back the amount you originally invested. Sustainable investments carry additional uncertainty – the environmental or social benefits expected may not be achieved. The information and opinions we share in this podcast are based on sources believed to be reliable, but we cannot guarantee they are accurate or complete, so they should not be relied upon as the sole basis for making investment decisions.