TransCap Initiative transforms finance through collaborative innovation and systemic financing

The TransCap Initiative is a think-and-do tank working at the nexus of real-economy systems change, sustainability, and finance. They focus on improving the way sustainable finance is purposed, designed, conceived and managed, so that money can become a transformative force in building a low-carbon, climate-resilient, just, and inclusive society.

The TransCap Initiative brings systems thinking to the world of purpose-driven finance to solve the big challenges of our time. Together with its network of partners, it does so by developing, testing, and scaling a new investment logic—systemic investing, or funding for systems transformation—fit for the complex interrelated challenges of the 21st century.

TransCap collaborates with wealth owners, institutional investors, foundations, financial intermediaries, researchers, public sector bodies, and innovators to change where and how money flows.

"The biggest challenges facing humanity today are complex, emergent, systemic problems. You can’t solve challenges like that with a single project. And similarly, you can’t solve them with a single investment. Money needs to be programmed using a system change logic in order to have transformative potential. We believe systemic investing is the next frontier of purpose-driven finance, helping us finance sustainability transitions at a pace and scale that matters."

— Ivana Gazibara, Director of Prototyping, TransCap Initiative

How is TransCap different from more traditional investing and sustainable finance solutions?

With traditional investing, including most sustainable finance and impact investing, the focus is on single-point investing and binary impact metrics (e.g. PV installation or carbon emission performance). By contrast, systemic investing is the deployment of financial capital to transform human and natural systems with the intention of advancing environmental sustainability and social justice.

The key difference lies in the term systemic, which by its nature affects how investing itself is approached and done. TransCap’s methods are based on the belief that it is insufficient for investors having an intention to “create impact” or “change systems” while leaving investment practices largely unchanged; it requires a more fundamental re-assessment of how investing works as a practice of capital deployment.

In practice, this means starting with a challenge and thinking about how capital can solve it, rather than starting with a capital source and financing an existing solution; deploying multiple types of capital in service of addressing a challenge, rather than using a single type of capital to finance one investment or project at a time.

Why does TransCap Initiative’s approach to finance matter?

The current landscape of finance—including sustainable finance, ESG, and impact investing—is falling short of delivering the positive impact on the challenges of our time. Finance is a critical lever for change, but as yet is under-utilised. Even most purpose-driven finance operates similarly to traditional finance in that it seeks to achieve results against individual metrics, like carbon or water, very rarely centering a particular mission or challenge.

TransCap upends this approach: all their work starts with the intersection of a challenge, place, and the setting of a particular transformational intent or goal. Everything else flows from this point, including how the investment strategy is developed and how investment portfolios are composed, seeking to align individual investments within the portfolio so that they amplify each other. For example, in one of their ongoing prototypes on Capital Orchestration for regenerative agriculture, their work is focused on designing and implementing a financing platform that changes the way money moves through the agricultural system—directing investment so that the right kind of capital, in the right amount, flows to the areas with the greatest strategic potential to accelerate the transition to regenerative agriculture in the Midwest.

Systemic investing, thus, is not about risk reduction through diversification, but about value creation through synergistic alignment of individual investments.

"Systemic investing is not about risk reduction through diversification, but about value creation through synergistic alignment of individual investments."— Ivana Gazibara, Director of Prototyping, TransCap Initiative

What could the future look like if systemic investing becomes the norm?

If systemic investing as TransCap envisages it were to become the norm, capital could flow more easily to the people and places which need it most, and in a manner which addresses root causes and underlying issues. Furthermore, if synergies for impact on a mission across a portfolio of investments were a key feature of all investments, we could see compounding impact across investments, instead of misaligned and/or competing projects and portfolios.

Questions to consider

What are the dominant assumptions about the role of capital in creating impact, and how can TransCap’s approach challenge those views?

What would it take for systemic investing to become the de-facto modus operandi of sustainable finance?

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