Josh Hile
Eastside investment and product development executives Josh Hile and Marshall Dunford announced today the formation of Citizen Mint, a new impact investing platform designed to help investors generate both financial returns and positive social and environmental impact, according to a press release.
Citizen Mint has a small office in Bellevue. Hile is from Issaquah and Dunford splits his time between Bellevue and Los Angeles.
“The demand for investments, particularly among Generation X and millennials, that align financial resources with personal interests and values is simply not being met in today’s market,” said Hile, who will serve as Citizen Mint’s CEO and Chief Investment Officer. news release. “We started Citizen Mint to provide a new avenue for investors to participate in private market projects that create financial returns while having a direct positive impact on the world.”
Gen X represents people born between 1965 and 1980, and millennials, also known as Generation Y, were born between 1981 and 1996, according to the Pew Research Center.
Younger investors represent an important source of wealth, as well as a shift in how they view the world, the release said.
A Fidelity Charitable study released this year found that 61 percent of millennials say they participate in impact investing and 62 percent believe impact investing has more power to create change than traditional charity. A 2019 Morgan Stanley survey found that 95 percent of millennials with more than $100,000 in investable assets have an interest in sustainable investing. But for many, investments in private markets and real assets are out of reach, often only available to institutional investors or clients of financial advisors with high minimum investment thresholds, according to the release.
Marshall Dunford
Instead of Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) or Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategies, Citizen Mint will focus exclusively on these investment opportunities in the private market. The company will use a proprietary process to source and conduct due diligence on high-value investment opportunities and provide an easy-to-use user interface that allows investors to select specific projects and areas of interest, and monitor investment impact and performance, the release said.
For compliance purposes, Citizen Mint will be registered as a registered investment advisor (RIA), much like some venture capital firms, Hile said in an email that further explained the company’s role.
Citizen Mint is building an online platform that allows individual investors to both select investments based on their areas of interest and monitor the investment for financial performance and impact-related key performance indicators, he wrote.
“The mechanics include creating Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) that pool individual investor capital and turn the investment into a fund or sponsor (for example, the sponsor could be a single real estate deal or specific solar panel development deal),” Hile wrote. “Citizen Mint will obtain and conduct due diligence on all investment opportunities before they are made available to the community.”
Prior to launching Citizen Mint, Hile held investment and leadership roles at Russell Investments and, most recently, as director of investment strategy and research at Laird Norton Wealth Management, a $16 billion RIA and trust firm with deep expertise in impact investing, according to the release.
Dunford, who will serve as chief technology officer, has worked as a software engineer across a variety of industries, building new products, leading initiatives to increase scalability and security, and leading multiple projects from concept to millions of active users. In a previous role at MedBridge, he worked closely with the CEO, led the patient engagement team and built a product used by healthcare professionals and patients across the country, according to his biography on Citizen Mint’s website.
In addition to Hile and Dunford, Citizen Mint has a team of part-time engineers, and is looking to add a vice president of marketing and a senior backend engineer to its close team. They have also brought in best-in-class legal and compliance advisers and are expanding their board of advisers, wrote Hile.
