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Tag: social investment
Truth or dare – transparency by vanguard social investors reveals risks and returns in a maturing market
A landmark study released today via the Government’s open data portal reveals for the first time historic performance of UK social investment activity.
The total financial performance (comparing all capital draw downs with all capital, interest and fee payments) over the 12 year period was negative 9.25% (-0.77% annualised)*. Counterintuitively, this is remarkably good given that pricing of capital was driven by affordability and not risk adjusted. Moreover, most of these social investments were made after the investees had been refused finance from High Street institutions. They would therefore be classified as high risk deals.Read More »
Words & All: My Live TV Interview on BBC World News
Because one always wants to remember the first time – below is a transcript of my first live TV interview. I was asked to explain social enterprise, social investment and EngagedX in 2 minutes…
The Welfare State is dead – long live the Kinky State
I don’t mean the type of adulterous scooter socialism enjoyed by French President Francois Hollande – I mean an agile and nimble State that is deftly able to do more with less. Kinky like an inflection point in a trend line. Kinky as in ‘crinkled’ and ‘intertwined’ and ‘complex’ and ‘strikingly unconventional’. Kinky like talk about the rise of smart power in a multi-polar world – because this is the new practical reality, not because the laissez-faire types won the ideological debate about the size of the state. Quite the contrary, it’s dangerous to mistake coincidence for causality.
How to accelerate social investment – my interview/ podcast for Cambridge University, Judge Business School
Discussing the opportunities and challenges of bringing together finance and social investment. Social investment is still a small market segment but has tremendous potential. There are more investors who are looking for projects that can deliver both social impact and financial returns, while organisations that historically relied on grants look for alternative sources of funding without losing sight of their social purpose.
The fancy names aren’t helping – let’s call it investment and get on with doing it properly
The extent of debate (and often disagreement) about the definition of social impact investment is fascinating – exploring in great depth the nuances and prerequisite principles for investing in a way that seeks both positive social outcomes and financial returns. But this discourse risks being divisive and self-defeating. Does this complexity actually attract or repel new investors from engaging in this exciting market?
Evidence Submission – UK Parlimentary Commission on Banking Standards
The Commission on Banking Standards is appointed by both Houses of Parliament to consider and report on:
- professional standards and culture of the UK banking sector, taking account of regulatory and competition investigations into the LIBOR rate-setting process
- lessons to be learned about corporate governance, transparency and conflicts of interest, and their implications for regulation and for Government policy and to make recommendations for legislative and other action
A copy of my evidence submission 8 February 2013 is published below, read the invitation from the Commission to submit here.
Osborne’s 2013 Budget for the UK – giving love a chance?
A committed fiscal conservative like UK Chancellor George Osborne was never going to deviate from Government’s hard-wired policy of austerity. Nobody really expected a change of course in his 2013 Budget, not even after his recent humiliation by Moody’s downgrade of Britain’s triple A credit rating – a humiliation not because of the fundamental impact of the downgrade, which was negligible, but because Osborne himself had placed such high importance on retaining the AAA status.
World’s first financial index for impact investing unveiled
Press release: 11 December 2012, London (reblogged here 12 Dec)
Engaged Investment has launched a pilot to test the creation of the world’s first investment index for the growing emerging market of social investment (‘impact investing’, as it is called globally). This is an important next step forward towards creating the infrastructure needed for the global expansion of social finance.
Impact Measurement – A conceptual framework
Tomorrow (5 Dec) in Brussels I will be presenting my views on the impact measurement discourse at a conference on “Measuring the Social Impact of Social Enterprises”. My approach will be to explore how to frame the discussion in the context of a market centric perspective as part of developing EngagedX – the world’s first financial index for impact investing. For the purposes of compiling an index, we are agnostic about specific metrics used and instead seek to determine a meta-framework approach for how to map and categorise the data of all metrics in use.
Karl H Richter 