Research Insight: Embarking on your Sustainable Impact Investing by leaning on your village

Author: Juliana Koh, Head of Research, CSP Singapore

The nascent field of systemic investing can feel intimidating. However, our newest guide provides a roadmap for wealth holders on how to pursue sustainable impact investing by relying on five key groups: 1) fellow wealth holders; 2) wealth managers and financial service providers; 3) researchers; 4) public funders; 5) field builders.

Lean on your fellow wealth holders

The challenges facing humanity demand long term, systemic and collaborative efforts to get solutions off the ground. Wealth holders looking to scale their impact should take heed the proverbial saying “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”. Connect with fellow wealth holders, envision how you can work towards your dreams, and share your experiences. Together, work to identify the problem, map the system and identify the most effective leverage points for the investment. Fellow wealth holders are your collaborators. By staying open and intentional, you can build a community of practice that uplifts one another. It is only through networks that you will be able to adequately address the complexity of the system and create value through portfolios of synergistic investments, incorporating a range of capital sources, including commercial investments, concessional capital or philanthropic funding.

Seek stability in wealth managers and financial service providers

Often overlooked is the utility of performance data. In the face of the geo-political instability caused by accelerated technological evolution and the climate change crises, there will be a large drop in the utility of past performance data from management teams and asset classes. In this unique challenge time, lean on wealth managers and financial service providers who are plugged into the systemic investing landscape and have the ability to generate synergies across multi-asset portfolios for you. Ultimately, to maintain financial performance, you will need access to data that reflects the system.

Learn how to manage complexity with researchers

Systems are alive and constantly evolving, morphing, and transforming. As part of your systemic investing activity, you could directly support research organizations who are examining or mapping a specific system of your interest or provide field-building support for systemic investing by funding academics researching the significance of backbone organizations for systemic transformation. This benefits the ecosystem and problems that you are trying to solve and leaning on researchers provide an external perspective to help you bridge the knowledge chasm and decision-making for your resource allocation.

Explore potential for greater coordination with public funders

There is building pressure on public budgets to address national and international development issues. Systemic investing focuses on enabling conditions and leverage points for systemic change, it uses multiple asset classes simultaneously to recalibrate the underlying system generating the problem. It can act as a bridge for greater efficacy when coordinating investment activity with public funders. Systemic investing can facilitate the development and articulation of shared objectives to coherently blend private assets and public funding. As a wealth holder, you can lean on the public funders to build synergistic portfolios to enhance value and draw on a full stakeholder network to enable solutions.

Unlock potential with field builders

Wealth holders play a role in seeding, deepening and scaling systemic investing as collaborators, investors and ecosystem builders. Lean on field builders to accelerate and scale impact. Building a field requires both a bringing together of diverse actors and a reconfiguration of relations to manage tensions to unlock potential. In systemic investing, there’s a tension between the need for methodological and conceptual rigor and ensuring accessibility to the field. As a wealth holder, lean on this inclusive field and you’ll find a village ready to support you.

Systemic investing can move forward research and development, innovation, entrepreneurship, international development, community finance, and climate adaptation — sectors where collaboration can drive transformative impact. Those who would like to learn more can do so at CSP’s Investing for Systems Change program.