The Global Steering Group (“GSG”) was established in 2015 as the successor to the Social Impact Investment Taskforce, created and empowered by the G8. Its objective is to catalyze the impact investing market globally by providing a unified vision of the market potential and empowering, supporting and education country-led efforts.

Sir Ronald Cohen (HBS MBA, 1969), leader of the GSG, kicked off the conference with a bold vision: an impact revolution in which finance and investing is transformed to include risk, return, and impact by 2020.  To state the obvious, this is an audacious goal for a field that commands less than $200 billion in assets under management globally.

Much of the discussion at the conference and within the field has been around the blocking and tackling of minimizing barriers to entry (education, taxonomy, policy) and maximizing the opportunity set (pipeline, products). Put more simply, there is an emphasis on building out an ecosystem with an underlying assumption that if you create the enabling factors, capital will flow. “Build it and they will come,” as the saying goes...

 

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