Inyova

You’re looking at an old review. Go to the updated 2025 review to learn how my impression of Inyova, along with my portfolio’s performance, held up over the years.

Manager of stock portfolios specialised in tailor-made ESG investing.

Receive CHF 60.- (CHF 5.- per month over 12 months) and support Invest4Change by entering the referral code ef318 when joining Inyova.

Inyova (previously Yova) is a young start-up emerging from Impact Hub Zürich, Switzerland, which is part of a global network of incubators. They advertise their service as “Impact Investing on Autopilot”. The coolest part of investing with Inyova is the ability to create an investment strategy tailored to your values. So they are true to their name, which stands for “INvest in YOur VAlues”.

1. You start by choosing between different impact topics, such as education, circular economy or clean water.
2. Now you select negative criteria, if you don’t want to invest in nuclear or animal testing, for example.
3. Based on your preferences the Yova algorithm sets up a diverse portfolio of publicly traded stocks out of a hand-picked basked. This selection is further customisable, you can remove or add individual companies.

This is a huge advantage compared to conventional offers, which present you with a take-it-or-leave-it kind of choice. Creating a strategy is free, so you can just sign up and give it a go!

Purists say that Inyova does not actually let you do “Impact Investing”, as this would mean creating impact that would not have happened without your investment. The publicly traded companies in Inyova’s basket all have access to plenty of capital, so if you don’t invest, someone else likely will.

Still, unlike most other players on the market, all companies in their basket do make a positive and active contribution towards sustainable development, be it in renewable energy or clean water. One of Inyova’s USPs is transparency, since you know exactly what you have in your portfolio. Fees are decent (1.2% in most cases), which is on par with or even slightly cheaper than regular sustainability funds that still include Nestlé, Apple etc.

Inyova also tout their financially sound algorithm as a way to provide you with a robust portfolio, including bonds. However, this has so far failed to convince me, since they only include government bonds. While this may be sound from an investment theory perspective, it is not very attractive in the current low-interest environment.
They consider responding to that criticism by reducing the rate they charge on the amount invested in bonds, but I haven’t seen it happen yet.

My experience with Inyova (spoiler: it’s great)

Inyova has a somewhat personal dimension to me since it was one of the first “alternative” investment options I found on my journey towards sustainable investing. When I realised that they had their offices not just in my city, but literally around the corner, they definitely had my interest! Later I attended some events hostet by this young but very ambitious team, which personally convinced me of their approach for the time being. We will see how their model plays out. But my take-away was definitely that personal contact with a provider of investment products can go a long way in creating the trust necessary to make an investment.

I’ve been invested with Inyova since 2018, starting with a minimum investment and a monthly savings plan. My themes were fairly broad, including mostly environmental issues such as clean energy, but also a few social ones, such as healthcare. After they added new themes earlier this year, circular economy and plant-based foods among them, I changed my strategy to include these.

As I said, I am very convinced, even inspired by their approach to investing. But what surprised me the most is that – so far – the performance of my portfolio has been stellar. As of today, my time-weighted return is at 75%. That’s fantastic! My Inyova portfolio has outperformed my more conventional investments by far, at comparable cost. And we’re not talking about one single stock where it could be down to pure luck, but a portfolio composed of 30+ stocks. Now, bear in mind that two years is not a long time in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still a very positive testimony to Inyova’s approach.

There is, however, a lack of transparency about how this performance was achieved. Was it all due to one or two companies with ridiculous performance, suggesting an investment bubble? Here Tesla comes to mind, but they were excluded from Inyova’s basket early in 2020. Or is it part of a wider trend benefiting sustainable firms? You can of course individually check the performance of every company in your portfolio. But there is no way of accounting for changes made by Inyova’s algorithm or portfolio managers. While this is a minor downside, it’s potential for improvement.

Are you invested with Inyova? If so, I would be curious to hear about your experiences in the comments down below!

Pros and Cons

• Pro: Sustainable investing tailor-made to your values
• Pro: Fair and straight-forward fees, compared to competitors
• (Pro): Stellar performance, but that may not be applicable to other portfolios.
• Pro/Con: Transparent about the composition of your portfolio, but not so much about portfolio performance
• Con: Still limited track record when it comes to providing financial services. Sustainable investing is still new for almost all other providers out there. But being a young upstart, Inyova still has to prove they can keep up with big banks and stay ahead of the game.

Category	Actively managed funds
Country of origin	Switzerland (investing takes place in Swiss Francs at the moment)
Geographical focus	Switzerland, Europe and United States
Minimum investment	CHF 2000
Cost	1.2% of invested amount per year up to CHF 49’999.-, which is gradually reduced down to 0.6% for the fat cats out there who can afford to invest above CHF 500k with one single company.
Referral programme	Receive 6 months of free investing and support Invest4Change by joining Inyova through this link and entering the following referral code: ef318. If you already have a friend investing with Inyova, their referral code will save you both 6 months worth of investment fees (meaning savings of CHF 12 if you invest the minimum amount). Also, two trees are planted for each (free) investment strategy that is created due to a referral, but I’m not a big fan of this idea.
Similar offers	tickr.co.uk: similar outfit and approach (except that they focus on ETFs), but currently only available to investors from the UK SwellInvesting.com: a similar outfit from the US, which was only available to US investors. Sadly, they failed to scale enough to meet expectations and closed down at the end of July 2019.