Focus
Developing frameworks and recommendations based on field experience, industry knowledge and future trends. Combining best practices with emerging solutions, I believe four key areas of focus will deliver powerful results.
Business development
Insight
Social entrepreneurs often have a more difficult time launching and growing a business due to the fine balance between market solutions and the impact the business is pursuing to make.
Sales growth
One of the key learnings after advising several early stage businesses, is the ability to find a market fit quickly that allows the business to gain traction and scale a repeated process of selling a product or service. Without a clear traction, efforts dilute and the business eventually fade away due to lack of cash. Especially at such an early stage, a cashflow strategy becomes the most important aspect of the business after a solid winning product or service.
Business case for impact
An important learning is how a product or service with a social mission needs to comply with being useful, desirable and viable, with a demonstrated market demand. Otherwise, you only have a "cool" initiative but will struggle to get off the ground. The more you delve into your impact strategy, the more tools you have to leverage from innovation, cost efficiency, marketing and fundraising.
Impact Investing
Insight
Investors have a hard time deciding where to allocate capital when there is a need for risk, return and impact to coexist.
Right financial instrument
Having a bottom up approach can unleash financial innovation, where new financial instruments that are more tailored to a niche market such as the missing middle, can prove to be successful. The challenge after the design process is how to educate the demand of capital to ensure a fluid adoption.
Intention towards impact
Having a clear mandate around where to allocate capital to see social or environmental impact, is key to attract the right kind of investor and impact measurement becomes a must, rather than a nice to have. Having a focus on a sector or a cause tends to be an effective way to prove impact outcomes.
Sustainable Finance
Insight
Asset owners and asset managers often find restrictions on how to allocate their capital when there is not enough information or they can´t quantify the risks pertinent to an opportunity.
ESG Investing
A key learning around ESG investing is how to convert the ESG approach from risk mitigation to value creation. The level of requirements from projects to become investable under the ESG lens is quite extensive, but without a clear sense of how that opportunity can bring value to different stakeholders, performance around the investment won't be optimized. Integrating ESG practices into the investment mandate is increasingly becoming the norm.
Climate finance
After COP26, there is a clear message delivered. Net zero or a "just transition" is becoming the new norm, as a mechanism to keeps us within the frontier of unprecedented climate change. What this entails is a strong wave that signals the inevitable need for more and better financial systems that can approach climate change as an opportunity (adaptation and resilience) instead of a threat (mitigation).
Blended finance
Insight
The flow of private capital to unleash development is sometimes hindered by a lack of innovative and complementary deal structures and attractive returns, especially at earlier stages of the investment lifecycle.
How commercial investors blend
The goal is to create create acceptable risk-return profiles to mobilize private sector investment to SDG projects in developing countries, by using the focus and infrastructure of the traditional financial system. Commercial investors are considered pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, commercial banks, investment banks, private equity firms, and Asset/wealth managers.
How impact investors
blend
The goal is to create create acceptable risk-return profiles to mobilize private sector investment to SDG projects in developing countries, by using the focus and intention of nascent investment funds and structures. Impact investors are considered private equity funds, foundations.