Katy Yung
Managing Partner, Sustainable Finance Initiative
Impact Week 2024 was a week like no other we have seen before. The series of events provided a wide-range of viewpoints about impact investment, from the Hong Kong Academy for Wealth Legacy’s Summit to JLIN LLC’s purpose-driven investing and to our own SFi Asian Family Impact Summit.
Even with the benefit of a few weeks to reflect, I’m still digesting all that I saw and heard. That said, as I reflect on the week, one word stands out: collaboration.
It is not a word you’d automatically associate with the financial services sector, but in the last 15 years, I've become convinced it is the hallmark of impact investing. It is also a critical characteristic if we are to catalyse the trillions of dollars needed to solve the many challenges ahead. That collaboration will be necessary as we overcome the many challenges of a sector that is, at best, 20 years young.
In its way, impact investing is like a new technology – it takes time for people to get comfortable with it. If you think back to the summer of 2008, very few people could have predicted the future for Tesla and the wider EV sector, which now accounts for 13% of all new car sales worldwide.
It has taken years to build the infrastructure needed to make battery-powered vehicles a reality, requiring extensive government and private sector investment, regulation and a good dose of luck along the way.
I would say the lessons – from both the EV sector and the SFi Asian Family Impact Summit – can be broadly summarised into three points:
1. Power in the collective: if we can effectively organise ourselves and continue to collaborate, there is enormous potential. Our Summit illustrated the breathtaking array of players, each making significant inroads on the impact investment sector in Asia and around the world, but, with better alignment, our collective power would be unstoppable.
Making this a reality requires deliberation, bandwidth and funding, and perhaps the creation of an impact council to champion the work of Asia’s superstar impact investor community.
2. Dive deeper: there was a huge amount of energy throughout the Summit, but it was also obvious that there remains significant room to up the ante and move beyond the basics of impact investment. We need to challenge the ingrained perceptions of what we do and that can only happen through communication and education.
This is where our partners play such an important role. SFi will continue to play its part in curating the dialogues necessary to move our sector forward as quickly as we can.
3. East meets West: we were very fortunate to welcome impact investors from across the globe at the Summit, hearing about their journeys, successes and even failures. While we can learn from the way they have approached impact investment, we cannot simply ‘copy and paste’ their strategies. Instead, we need to be inspired by their work and find ways to adapt ideas to suit the needs of Asia so we can accelerate the pace of our development.
I am deeply encouraged by the second iteration of the Summit; as a collective of impact investors in Asia there is much for us to be proud of. There is, however, considerable work ahead if we are to accelerate our rate of progress – a challenge made more daunting by the knowledge that the world’s most pressing problems are becoming more acute with each piece of research published.
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