Day 4 ⏐ Session 3

Written By Johannes Björkman

(Un)Stuck in the middle with you:
how catalysts and convenors are unlocking investment flows

Who will connect the right capital, at the right time, in the right ways, to truly shift systems? We heard directly from those actively working as intermediaries to bring together different flows of capital in new ways, with Erica Barbosa, Second Muse (CA); Giulio Quaggiotto, former Head of Strategic Innovation at UNDP (UAE); Adam Spence, Social Venture Connexion (SVX) (CA); Amit Shah, Bridges Outcome Partnerships (UK) and Thomas Bagge Olesen, Den Social Kapitalfond (The Social Capital Foundation) (DK)

“...it’s actually a matter of developing different financial instruments, or it’s actually a matter of developing different forms of trust and understanding what this is and obviously increasing our own understanding of financial instruments. So that’s really been in our exploration”
— Guilio Quaggiotto

Resources

Quotes from the session

  • “...our overall objective is on inclusion of, or of fighting the loss, of social cohesion” (Thomas Bagge Olesen)

  • “it’s really important to be able to move assets but also community of actors so that they can cooperate on investment in the development of infrastructure. So this led to the concept, as we developed a community of about 1200 investors, of consolidating and growing that into a movement. So Impact United launched in 2021. Its community a movement of asset owners, including foundations, families, faith based organisations, institutions and individuals that are committed to mobilising capital for social economic and environmental justice.” (Adam Spence)

  • “There's a real importance to connect investors with one another as peers, helps them to take the first or next step in their impact investing journey with someone that they trust” (Adam Spence)

  • “When they're [investors] are able to collaborate and learn from one another, that really untaps the potential collaboration between them and the potential of capital that that exists. It moves us beyond this idea of… ” (Adam Spence)

  • “Moving portfolio managers or advisors or large financial institutions allows for the opportunity for Co-investment at scale, instead of one investor moving dollars and assets. How we are allowing them to build and collaborate for hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in assets also allows them to interface at scale with government. And ultimately, this is going to mobilise capital, our goal with all of this towards the system change we're trying to achieve from climate action to poverty reduction…” (Adam Spence)

  • “...the ability for investors to convince one another to take action and to learn from one another, I think, is going to allow us to kind of take this movement to scale” (Adam Spence)

  • “Second Muse is a company that was that was created with thes intent to really understand and experiment with how we build new economies that don't that grow not at the expense of human dignity and the planet, and really looking at how we can do this through approaches such as mass collaboration and networking innovation.” (Erica Barbosa)

  • “...the systems that we are currently trying to adjust or reimagine are not broken, they're doing exactly what they were intended to do. They were just designed with faulty assumptions.” (Erica Barbosa)

  • “...if we really want to start to design things in a better way, the idea of really bringing as many perspectives as possible… becomes a necessity.” (Erica Barbosa)

  • “Entrepreneurs of today become economies of the future” (Erica Barbosa)

  • “Capital has a very loud voice at the table, it doesn't necessarily contribute value and with with the same alignment as the weight of its voice, and so it led us to think about how can we start to shift and how can we bring some of those principles of collaboration that we've been implementing with with entrepreneurship ecosystems into the investor community” (Erica Barbosa) 

  • “We really need to also think about the structures through which we're investing capital because we see that a lot of times some of those are perpetuating a lot of the inequities.“ (Erica Barbosa) 

  • “What does an abundant future for this population look like is our starting point?” (Erica Barbosa)

  • “The key factor I think, for me is that you have a set of outcome that you can clearly define… The next thing I think that's really important is that you build in this space for innovation… And the third thing I think is just the alignment across the board. When this works really well, it aligns incentives for the outcomes payer because they want to achieve those outcomes for the individuals, our incentives are aligned as the kind of provider of capital and then you have the delivery organisation who, when this works really well, love it because it allows them to kind of do the work that they want to do” (Amit Shah)

  • “...changing had to start with us, within ourselves. Our systems and our ways of working were really designed for single point solutions” (Giulio Quaggiotto)

  • “projects tend to have a very short time perspective, tend to work towards more incremental rather than transformative work and tend to break things into silos rather than taking system lens”. (Giulio Quaggiotto)

  • “And there's also an inherent competition in the development space for funding which makes the pooling of resources and working together, often quite difficult and competitive”. (Giulio Quaggiotto)

  • “... we had to think beyond projects, right and start even to get the imagination of what it looks like to create a tool that is coherent with the nature of a challenge that you're trying to solve, which is long term, multifaceted and require many different type of investments” (Giulio Quaggiotto)

  • “... two very difficult things, which I think are coming up very strongly from this conversation. One is the accountability. How do you make these things accountable not only to investors but actually to the community that these projects are meant to serve? And the second question, which I think Amit alluded to, in the question around the outcome based bonds…” (Giulio Quaggiotto)

  • “... we found two fundamentally different worldviews of people who… think that things are fundamentally complex… that by definition, no matter what a wonderful plan you do at the beginning, things are going to work in a different way because you learn about this complexity as you go and there is a view that is… Excel spreadsheets, and this is exactly what we promised to get and this is what we are going to get… it's not value judgment, it's just very different worldviews” (Giulio Quaggiotto)

  • “Part of our exploration was, is it actually a matter of developing different financial instruments or is it actually a matter of developing different forms of trust and understanding?” (Giulio Quaggiotto)

  • “... this sense of learning into change , I think is really, really important. Although some people will then say, yeah, but actually, okay, we've got to learn, build trust with the rest of it, but the world is burning, you know, we've got to sort of get on with stuff.” (Chalrie Leadbeater) 

  • “What I think you have to sort of take away from this is that we will learn our way into new roles, new behaviours, which at the moment might seem odd, but will start to seem incredibly conventional. That is what will happen when systems start to shift when the esoteric and the exotic become normal and obvious.” (Charlie Leadbeater) 

Johannes Björkman
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