 Okay well hello welcome everybody we want to kick off and keep our panel on time I'm delighted to be here moderating panel with an incredible lineup of leaders in this field the topic that we're going to talk about today the role of advisory services in the field is one that's very personal and close to the hearts of us that tied line as an advisor in the field we have been challenged and have really strived to clarify as as much as possible our role and services in the impact investing market while also being responsive to a diversity of client needs and and we know a lot of intermediaries are challenged with that same balancing act today I'm delighted to introduce a panel of mainly asset owners who are going to really share their perspectives on the field so starting from from your your right your left sorry John Zhuang on the the left who runs impact investing for the Lumina Foundation previously managed Kellogg Foundation's impact investment portfolio Robin Stefan who leads Omidyar Network's impact investment activities previously at the at the White House leading the impact investing initiative there Shweb Siddiqui at Sirdna Foundation leading the impact investing strategy and finally Omid Sath running the impact investing strategy at Prudential before we jump into this conversation and the heart of it I am going to ask our our dear friend Fran Siegel and the executive director of the US impact investment Alliance to give some introductory remarks this is a topic that's been she's given a lot of thought to and including publishing an article recently on the on the topic so Fran please come on up I'm Fran Siegel executive director of the US impact investing Alliance which is a field building organization whose mission is to put measurable social and environmental impact at the center of all investment decisions alongside financial returns and risk we seek to achieve that by lifting up coordinating and we're necessary gap-filling between organizations that make up the impact investing ecosystem that ecosystem of course is made up of investors so the supply of capital investees the demand for capital and intermediaries that connect the two and just to kind of level set for the purposes of this panel when we talk about intermediaries we're not talking about fund managers we're talking about intermediaries such as like a pure play broker dealer like impact us which has a platform of offerings of CDFI and other types of investments maybe various as a pure play wealth advisor wealth management firm incumbent wealth platforms like Bank of America Merrill Lynch JP Morgan Morgan Stanley Goldman and strategy consultants like tide line so this is a continuation of a conversation that we started with tide line in April where we brought together 40 impact investing intermediaries to have a frank discussion about the state of the field with Chatham House rules in addition to Christina who served on the panel we also had Tim McCready who's CIO of Christian Super a billion dollar pension fund in Australia that has moved to a hundred percent ethically screened portfolio and in doing so they seated their own intermediary investment advisor and manager called bright light to source and manage a portfolio of impact investments for others we also heard from Dana Bezzaro SVP at Heron Foundation which likewise has gone all in for impact so to frame the conversation today I want to share a visual that was developed by tide line that's what appears here and on the x-axis you see a range of intermediation services from strategy to market research deal sourcing and diligent portfolio construction and portfolio management including management of both financial and impact returns and on the y-axis you have a range of asset owners and so this is just really to show first where different kinds of intermediaries are playing in this space and maybe showing some gaps and opportunities so we had this really terrific a dialogue a round table discussion and there are a couple of topics that we that the participants discussed one was the opacity of functions and services across categories so these kind of neat boxes that we see here on the slide aren't so clear when we put them into practice in real life firms are feeling pressure to offer services outside their core competencies so for example we heard from a wealth advisor who said I kind of backward integrate into strategy because but they're real for competencies portfolio construction and portfolio management and so we have a kind of blurring of lines at times there was also a lack of clarity by asset owners about their objectives so intermediaries feel as if asset owners don't clearly understand their own goals or what's required to achieve them and this is really what we're trying to explore on today's panel is to hear from asset owners about how they work with intermediaries and what they seek to achieve in working with them one other thing that we talked about in the context of the round table is all of this lack of specificity leading to difficulty in pricing services we don't talk too much about this professional service business models here at SoCAP but we felt it was really important to shine a light on that particularly when being asked to step out of their core business model some folks are doing aspects of this x-axis as a loss leader to do some of the other stuff and so there's like backward integrating there's forward integrating and there as a result a lot of hidden costs and inefficient solutions and as a result the business models aren't as robust as we'd like them to be so these are important challenges but not necessarily unexpected for nascent field that is experiencing rapid growth in April we talked about some potential solutions most importantly was a forum to continue the dialogue separate from pitching clients and competing for deals we need a space to discover and socialize best practices for the field it's not custom for intermediary competitors to be in the same room and have a frank discussion but there was a lot of goodwill in the in the room and we thought that we got to a fairly deep dialogue we talked about the need for a more unified language and taxonomy for articulating asset owner preferences and requirements so we're excited to continue the conversation today a part two if you will we plan to write up the proceedings but we won't name names even though the conversation is taking place in a public forum we hope you enjoy taking part in the dialogue thank you attention on on what it takes to to develop a functioning intermediation system and impact investing so as we jump into the discussion now I I want to help orient our panelists and myself to our audience and I'd like to just ask people out there if you could kind of give a show of hands based on this definition of broad definition of intermediaries everything from strategy consultant to investment consultant to investment manager how many of you in the audience would define yourself as representing an intermediary okay and and how many would would say they represent an asset owner or an investor great and and how many and an investee or an investee organization or enterprise okay great well it's like we have a relatively even split between asset owners and intermediaries and I'd like I gave a fairly brief introduction of all of you so I I'd like just to start out by asking each of you to to introduce your organization and and what role you you serve in this market and and kind of briefly explain how you interact with intermediaries and we'll we'll this isn't meant to to get into the specifics of the challenges you face but just a brief introduction so John can we start with you yeah sure thank you for having us here my name is John Duong I lead the impact investing program at Lumina Foundation Lumina is the largest private foundation focused exclusively on higher ed we have one goal with a set time frame which is relatively unique among foundations and that goal is to increase the proportion of Americans having a high quality post-secondary credential by 2025 essentially up to 60% from today which is about 45% from a quantitative standpoint that's roughly 16.4 incremental credentials to be generated of that time frame so it's a pretty lofty goal given our foundations only about a billion one in assets and the higher ed space is about half a trillion so even if we had donated all of it in one year we're not going to move the needle so we're using impact investing to drive that mission in combination with our grant making strategy and in terms of intermediaries we have a consultant called Avivar capital who has been helping us with the diligence we're very leanly staffed right now we are two people and because of that and all the functionalities that we need to have in building the platform from scratch that's what we use our intermediaries for great can you just give a brief description of the kinds of services Avivar provides your organization so prior to joining Lumina I was leading the impact investing program at the Kellogg Foundation but taking the lessons learned there you still have to start from ground zero when you're helping a brand brand new platform get built so Avivar has helped us think through the processes that we need to put in place but right now that the platform has developed to the point where it is today after two and a little over two years we are mainly using them for diligence writing the memos and helping us with thinking through some of the issues that we need to be careful of on the business side obviously we know the mission much better than any consultant would give in our very narrow focus on the higher ed space so a lot of it is almost operating as an outsourced staff in terms of following up with companies to do the financial analysis the mission alignments fit as well as some of the reference calls and then writing the information that we need to use to present to our executive team and our investment committee but we also use them for helping us with some of the convening functions that we organized and helping with panels in terms of facilitation great thank you and Robin Omidyarn Network is probably pretty widely known here but you're such a unique organization as a philanthropically driven investment firm how do you all interact with intermediaries yes first of all thank you for bringing us all together on this really important topic so we are a philanthropic investment firm that was created over a decade ago and has deployed over a billion dollars in both grants as well as impact investments over the 10 plus years we've actually built out a team of almost 150 people with seven global offices and so we do and we use that in-house capacity to be able to do mostly early stage direct deals towards a very specific theory of change around accelerating specific sectors the upshot of all of that is that actually we do we actually use intermediaries very little ourself we do almost everything in-house but the hat that I bring today is really our field building hat because we when Pam and Pierre created O.N. they very explicitly realized that they have this really ambitious vision for the world that they want to see and that even their billion dollars plus is just not enough to get us there so we think very intentionally about how do we distill the lessons from what we do to be able to accelerate the journeys of other families that are just getting started so we have actually worked with almost 150 families high net worth families that are beginning to think about and starting to do and then deepening their practice and impact investing we also help to co found an affinity group within the giving pledge for families there that really want to integrate impact investing not just grants and actually fund a number of peer-to-peer networks that create a safe space for high net worth families to learn from each other to see their portfolios to be able to understand how they did it and so the perspective I will bring today is really what we're hearing from those families and I would say big picture in terms of you know real headlines around the services they need number one there is just huge demand I think actually families have moved from you what is impact investing to we want to do it and figuring out how they actually put together the right team of internal and external is actually an enormous bottleneck I don't know if it's possible to put up the beautiful image that you guys had that came out of the session that you did this spring but I will note that when we see you know first as an important caveat we we see that every family is really unique and I think that's an incredible challenge for service providers because there really is no one-size-fits-all there they're in different points of their journey and they're taking a different journey towards impact investing but with that caveat I will say that there are some themes and one especially given that I I think that when people think about intermediate services they most typically think about deal sourcing or due diligence or the legal piece in terms of actually structuring the deal and getting it done but from my perspective I think I see an enormous need from families actually you know in your far left side of that image and even off the chart further to the left yeah and would just underscore that that discovery process is is a really big step especially for families that have more than one decision maker so understanding both discovery of what impact investing is discovery of what their peers are doing discovery of what really motivates them and their family in terms of what they want their legacy to be what impact areas what geographies and also their requirements so how do they go go after those goals how much family involvement can they have how much flexibility do they need how much are they willing to spend on off-ex in terms of what they do in house versus externally and and what sort of returns do they need are they trying to grow capital in an endowment or are they thinking about a pocket of money we're really the alternative as a grant where they won't they won't see the returns and so figuring out those basics you know I think up front for answer that there's a reflection from the the initial gathering of you know our asset owners ready at the point that they're starting to engage advisory services and I think that piece of the work is something that families you know every family goes through and where they you know where they do need a lot of services but where there's still some gaps great that that is such a great and helpful perspective on the specific segment of family offices and high net worth individuals who are embarking on an impact investment journey it sounds like Omidyar network has been almost drawn into providing advisory services even if it wasn't part of the original vision of what the organization would be doing so I'd love to return to some of the thoughts you'd planted but Shweb Sirdna has been new to the field in some sense what what has been your experience yeah so I mean for us Sirdna as a hundred-year-old institution we have about a billion dollar endowment and earlier this year our board decided to allocate 10% of our capital to focus on impact investing and really invest that in a mission and values aligned way that is able to also generate the returns that we need to generate because we're a grant making organization first and foremost and so I think that's partly what we think about the hundred it is a start it is not this is the ceiling but we can imagine a day we're more and more of our capitals invested in a mission and values aligned way in terms of partnering with we work closely with Cambridge associates and one of the key things for us that we started out beginning is that we leveraged them to do again similar things to what John has talked about in terms of sourcing diligently perspective fund managers for us but they also do it across our endowment one of the things that we were intentional about is using them both for the impact pool but also for the larger endowment and we think that that's important because we don't want this hundred million dollars to be relegated to some site second class right and Cambridge has done a great job in terms of having a constant communication across who supports us on the traditional endowment and how we think about the the sort of the impact pool because one of the things we talk about a lot with Cambridge is okay we may invest in a fund out of the hundred million dollars today but when that fund raises a second capital we want to make sure if they're successful there's room for that in the traditional endowment and being part of one institution and being able to have that seamless conversation is quite critical to us because our long-term vision is eventually to move more capital into this great great yeah I run credentials impact investing program which is about a billion dollar commitment from the company it's all balance sheet capital and we haven't invested I think both in real estate and real asset strategies as well as more operating businesses and venture strategies in terms of our relationship with intermediaries I think I'd love to speak about sort of the point you made right in the beginning which is that there's a certain amount of sort of stage confusion among advisory firms and so for us we actually think that's an essential part of where the industry is at we've sort of adopted a kind of agile methodology where we couldn't go linearly right by the time we came up with a strategy opportunities to change transactional pieces have fallen apart yeah and so what we try to actually do is transact and and develop strategy in parallel and to sort of work at in an industry with a problem with a set of and really be investment driven and transaction driven and then come back to strategy after we've done a few deals to see what sort of felt resonant and that's actually been part of what we've I think struggled to work with some advisory firms because the traditional kind of left to right trajectory that's implied on that graphic isn't what we're seeing when we actually enter the marketplace we found actually one of the other services that's not really present is sort of the classic kind of investment banking service to actually structure transactions we brought all our diligence in house because we wanted to keep that in house as an investment firm but it is we end up playing a role as essentially an investment banker to the transactions so working with companies to say look you need this amount of debt this amount of equity here we can find some people here's who else we can bring into the deal that kind of classic investment banking is something that we feel is very lacking in the in the field and something that's very useful and part of the challenge though is that because of the opportunities that we see each individual deal size is small and so anybody being paid on a fee basis is struggling and I think we think that's an area that it's worth of exploring is how much of the traditional financial intermediation makes sense in the impact economy if you think about sort of everything we know about traditional finance diversify you know every turn everything into sort of you know mutual funds pooled vehicles in some ways that ruins the point of doing impact invest we want to be closer to our investing we want to know what the stories are we want to take concentrated bets on entrepreneurs we believe in and so much of sort of the intermediation structure that's dependent on either homogenizing things consolidating things combining things and having fees paid on a percentage may not work if the investable ecosystem looks incredibly diversified that's really fascinating I think there's a lot packed into your statement both in terms of an asset owners awareness of what stage they are at in the process of impact investing and what what advisory services they need and and then how the incentive fee structure is created for the intermediary to align those those interests I'm sure I'm interested in coming back to the Sirdna experience because I think it relates very specifically to this awareness and sort of self-awareness of an asset owners they go out to market seeking advice on what stage they are at and I know you have a number of reflections on it Sirdna's learnings in its first RFP in seeking advisory services and I think that we were very aware that when Sirdna and our board decided to even begin the journey of is this something we want to do and is this something we want to consider I think we spent a good year year and a half trying to understand what is the impact investing space really just investing in that and working with we work with various advisers for us and it was more about just the exercise of what is this space and helping our board and our staff and our grant making staff which often gets left to the side but we incorporated them into this of what does impact investing actually look like what is it what it can be you know what do we want it to be where is the flexibility for us and I think that was really really important we you know we were like we need someone to just guide us on understanding this space and it wasn't about what are we investing in or what we're not investing in and I so I think that we were very intentional of let's find someone who just focuses or tries to focus on this specific area because that's where we were in our journey it helped us to understand how we want to think about impact how we want to measure it what value do we have what do we think about returns all of those pieces and also in a way that we didn't feel like we were being sold a level of like these are the funds you want to invest in and we'll help you do that right it was really just let us understand and this is a start and end exercise of just understanding what's happening out there and I think that that's critical given the stage we were at we didn't you know as an institution we didn't know anything in terms of how we started great and just as a follow-on I'd love to hear a little bit about the reception in the market the response rate to the initial RFP for seeking advisory services how well matched were the service provider offerings with what certainly needed at that point in time it was wild sort of even if you just looked at the pricing thing the distinction between both some of the names that popped up were just even shocking to me from like oh really you guys are sort of feel comfortable that you want to advise in this space so I think that that was interesting even as I mentioned the fees were quite disparate and diverse as well and so that was one of the things that was interesting to us and it was also you know what practice to some of these institutions have and I think the tension we had where some of them are new but guess what the impact investing sector is new and some of them were tried intrude sort of institutions I'll call them where it was like are you doing this because this is just some set of a business you know or additional business or do you actually have built expertise in this space where some of the things that we observed great great so Robin on the the experience of families I wonder if you could provide a little bit more color I know Tideline's own experience as a strategy consultant in the market is definitely observing of the need for the kind of early-stage navigational and strategy development and yet also acknowledging that many families don't generally pay for those services on a sort of a flat fee type basis it tends to be wrapped in with other services so what you know how our families getting the services that they that you observe them needing other than coming to omit your network and and getting it for free yeah I think that it's a real challenge as we scale this part of the market and I wanted to actually plus one a couple things that you said both in terms of that need to take you know sometimes a year more than a year just to ask those foundational questions and the question of where you go to do that I think is one that families are really struggling with for a couple of reasons so one is you know you talked about this piece of wanting to be in a relationship for that exploration that has no conflict right so that you are being able to explore what is really the best fit for your vision for impact for your the returns you're looking for and and not being driven by what product is available or by other types of services that might follow on when you're deeper in your journey and that's actually I think candidly one of the reasons why we have so many families come and start in a very safe place of being able to say you know we know that this is a place where we can get smart and and be able to then engage with the market in a much more informed and empowered position and I do think that the growth of some of peer-to-peer networks are actually really helping with some of those initial stages where families say you know we're still nervous about taking that step of bringing on and you know an advisor or paid for services so we're going to start by actually just getting to a better understand what we see our peers doing in the marketplace and being able to get some of that that real data from a very trusted source I think in terms of where we should go there's a couple of interesting questions so the good news is that we have had you know like timeline I think a number of boutique firms that are really focusing on strategy for impact investing that are popping up the truth is that many of them are really small and so if you look just at the numbers actually most families still have the vast majority of their wealth with much larger traditional asset managers and in those instances there's some real tension there because but most of them are actually not have not traditionally provided that early-stage journey also the economics are really tough right so you hear a number a number of people reflect that actually they can do that loss leader but only for only for the whales only for the biggest clients and that means a lot of families have incredible capital to bring to bear really in the lurch but those conversations that are happening there and I will say even while they're imperfect I will note that you know as we look towards and start thinking about what does the future hold we just encourage all of the asset owners who are here today to note that the reason why the market's changing and the reason why we've gone from actually you know it being impossible to have that conversation with your advisor to actually incredible movement between you know Goldman acquiring imprint and Morgan Stanley actually doing a lot of training for their advisors and seeing you know some bridging is because of client demand and so I think it's fantastic when asset owners do RFPs I think it's fantastic when asked owners explicitly articulate the needs that they want to see from their current advisors and and and as well as potential potential new service providers and be really clear about that and and really and and when possible really public to be able to drive the market in a way that only asset owners can great great so I'm several of you have touched on the issue of conflicts in one way or another and I'm interested at what you know what you feel the role of asset owners is in sort of uncovering those conflicts in the intermediary market and the advisory market before before engaging a service provider John is this something that you've given thought to it at Lumina and not as much now than in my prior role where the portfolio was a lot larger we had only started investing in March of 2016 so we've only got seven portfolio companies but one of the concerns that we often think about is you know will the advisor be advising on both sides of the deal we want to make sure that there's maintenance of confidentiality with every one of our investees and whatever information that the investee shares with us that will be private and will not be shared with another potential investor who may have a portfolio company that competes and you'll it's a pretty small world and within the education space we we know a lot of the companies out there and there's everybody's trying to get a piece of the investee if they're really hot one and so you know we have had investees that are funds invested in a company that is a competitor of our direct investments so there lies another level of potential conflicts and when our intermediate advisors are providing us with advice we we want to make sure that they're clear that they can't be sharing information with our other investee ironically as they're doing the diligence and reference calls because that that will have implications and the information flow for me I think it's also about being an informed consumer I mean I think that these we have to acknowledge as these these conflicts exist you know whether it's someone who's advising you you're going to realize they are a business they're looking to create more business and I think that one of the things that we just have to be comfortable with is in that tension as consumers you know and going in as informed consumers and really understanding those different pieces because even some of the challenges that I think arises when you have two separate institutions providing the same level of service they have their own set of conflicts because they have their own sort of way that they do things and they don't want to necessarily have that cross that that transom either right and so I think that part of it is as a consumer of this we have to manage these tensions and a acknowledge that they exist and be aware of them and sort of put them on the table because I think that that's important because I don't necessarily think they're going to go away it's more that we know that they exist and we manage towards that yeah we've noticed and we've been coming to SoCAP for quite a while is that for a lot of people there is a lot of thinking there's a lot of complexity here but to the extent that your advisors are paid to help you think you'll think for a long time and part of making things happen is making things happen and so it's a real challenge is that systematically you either have a set of people who are quite frankly paid more the longer it takes the more complicated more customized more thoughtful the strategy becomes and then a set of folks who get paid to have transactions happen and may or may not care for sort of strategy and so there's a huge tension there and I think trying to fuse both I think is part of the answer is that you're just doing strategy or just transacting it's not really going to work and I think for us we found that our ability to do both at the same time helps us know what we want it's sometimes much easier to describe give me more of this and give me build a strategy around this than it is to let me think about the strategy and abstraction and I mean you I mean you reflected earlier on the pricing of the pricing methodology for service provision as being a key method for aligning interest between the client and the and the service provider can you talk a little bit more how that's done in an in a firm that might be offering kind of a full suite across the spectrum of of requirements so I think on the strategy consulting side part of why it's works a little bit better that I think the norms around professional services by the hour by the rates those work pretty well from a strategy consulting perspective I think it's on the transactional side that a lot of the models don't work very well right I mean a two and twenty model which is way too much compensation for a five billion dollar fund is way too little for five million dollars and so a lot of the traditional methods of driving compensation don't work when things are small and particularly when things are small complex illiquid and hard to find but it is very uncomfortable for folks who hear from sort of the vanguard on the other 95% of their assets which is drive down fees drive down fees drive down fees to then look at sort of what are the rational fees for a much smaller part of what they're investing and I think that's I think that's something that people have to get comfortable with is that early in the journey when you're in sort of the R&D phase let the fees on the transactions be what it takes to get you the transactions pay when you get to a transaction pay what it takes to get enough proof points that you can figure out what when you scale it's going to look like because I just want to add one distinction I think one of the important things of sort of where I sit and where Omid sits as you know you're doing direct deals we're investing in fund managers right and there's even within this conversation of the challenges that Omid faces and the challenges that a family office or an institution that's investing in fund managers that in itself and the service provision for that is in itself nuanced right because one of the things that for us the strategy is important because when we think about impact investing well what does that mean to us as an institution because we're not necessarily looking at transactions and even when we think when I say transaction it's assessing fund managers right I'm not going directly into a deal for example like Omid and again this is where that bifurcation or that separation also matters in terms of to add like additional complexity to this right it's also how are you planning on coming into this yeah do you as an institution want to do directs or do you think you want to go down via fund managers and that in itself sets a whole new set of service provision when you go down that path yeah I think we need a third dimension to our spectrum over there but it's a great point and at the risk of adding even more complexity right I would say that you know this piece about do you start by with strategy or do you start by doing deals in part also matters do you have one decision maker are you bringing an entire family along with you do you have multiple generations that you're really taking along on this journey with you and coming together around what that vision of impact investing is going to look like together so I think that's one piece and then the other piece I think is that people start in very different places and so for some families they feel like look we look at our current investments and we know it doesn't reflect us and we would really love for the right the right intermediary to help just fix that and that is that is where they are and I think other families come and they say you know we really want to go deep on fisheries and so how do you how do you think about or women's reproductive health right how do you think about that in terms of how you make an impact in that specific area wearing the hat of various asset classes like what's investable what's actionable there and so it really I think you know what is needed is just driven by are you director you fund who are the decision makers all of these different pieces right and I think part of just the learning journey is even just idea women's productive health of fisheries it's getting people to understand the limitations of investment dollars I think sometimes the language is like we're going to do it all and it's like no this is what's investable in this specific space and so a lot of that strategy work is that education of like what's actually investable based on your return expectations what you're trying to do and again this is why I think that it's a bit complex in terms of and become so personal to each family or foundation so I'd like to take the conversation to sort of a systems level perspective and then open it up to the audience and hope given how many intermediaries and asset owners are here I expect we'll get some interesting additional perspectives on this but at a systems level clearly we're dealing in a market that where asset owners are looking at an increasingly crowded intermediary market but very fragmented trying to navigate determine at what stage do I need this kind of advisor versus this sort of product provider what have you at the same time intermediaries and service providers are being very challenged by the heterogeneity of the asset owner requirements as is reflected on this panel in fact so you know at the when we think about the inefficiencies at the systems level I mean I've heard voices calling for greater specialization of intermediaries greater definition and I've equally heard voices saying we need consolidation in the market so I'm interested to hear views on on those two sides of the spectrum where you where you fall or perhaps it's not the right answer at all yeah I'll start I don't think they're on opposite ends of the spectrum you can actually have consolidation and specialization because in theory if there's more collaboration among intermediaries who are very good at their specific niche there's no reason why they can't collaborate or even merge you know and I don't understand why they wouldn't because it's a win-win instead of trying to expand your expertise by claiming you have something that you don't you're actually gonna hurt yourself in the long run when you do an assignment or a project that you don't deliver very well you want to be transparent with your client and make sure that they're aware and some of them are very patient in fact you know we had helped one intermediary who had just started with a contract that they had some relevant experience but the rest of the expertise was built over the years right as part of our systems building we actually as a philanthropy organization want to help build a system and we're open to that but you just got to be transparent about it if someone comes to you and says they know all these things but when they actually don't that sets a very challenging scenario because you make that client fail in what they're trying to do and you yourself didn't succeed either so that just hurts the overall field great I'll meet your perspective on this issue so one of our most successful intermediaries is our law firm so we use MacArthur English and it's been interesting right there mid-sized regional firm and that's just right for us we're able to get a couple of dedicated partners who sort of stay with us from deal-to-deal built a small practice around us where we're materialed so we feel important we get the kind of client service we want but then we've got the full resources of the firm because on any given transaction there'll be tax estate planning regulatory issues and you need to be able to bring in the full suite of expertise and so I really like what John said I think it's both but I would be wary about going to places where they're too big because you'll not be able to get that dedicated customization something to really work with you so I think it's somewhere more consolidated maybe where the field's at today but I would be very wary about thinking you're going to get what you need from a traditional firm building up a sub-practice okay great I'm just going to say I'm comfortable with the messiness I think that part of this is this is the evolution of a sector like no one steps back and designs what the perfect thing looks like right part of it is it is a little bit of trial and error trial and error it is working with different intermediaries it is different and finding out do you have like any other service provider any other relationship is this giving me what I want or do I want something else and I think that this is part of the for me the excitement and the evolution of this space and realizing what what matters to you as an institution and so a little bit for me it's let's embrace that chaos rather than run from it but yes it requires us as consumers to be more informed and that's one of the I think the challenges of this right but that's one of the things that I'll just add to that that's a great perspective building new markets is by necessity a messy process though regardless of which way we go I think transparency is critical yeah so this was something that you and Fran highlighted we see it all the time with families that they literally don't know who they should be calling and then they go through this crazy time intensive dating process right because they don't really know what services different actors provide let alone where their specialty is where it's not what they're really good at how they think about working with one and handing off to then start to the next as they move kind of from the left to the right or as I mean said maybe jump around within it and so being able to just understand what the market looks like to make it that more efficient I think is is critical regardless of whether it's good yeah great point great point well I'd like to kind of hand it over to the audience I believe we have a mic in the back so who would like to be the brave one and ask the first question one of the things we heard in the initial round table is that some rias are kind of backward integrating into the strategy as a loss leader because they want to create the sticky relationship with the client going forward and that makes it hard for strategy firms like tide line like how do you compete with free it's it's really hard and so if there's a limited willingness to pay and need to pay then folks may may not pay um what about the fact that um a number of intermediaries in our space I have observed are forward integrating into like kind of nibbling around the edges of like oh let's write an investment policy statement maybe we'll do some diligence but we won't actually tell you whether or not to invest and I think you know the sec has bigger fish to fry than you know our do-gooder intermediaries but I think that some folks have flirted with this kind of like kind of quasi broker dealer really should be registered as a with the sec as an ria and so how have you seen any of that and your you know your rfp bounty um and and you know what can you just talk about now to be honest it's an interesting question because it's not something that I think through our process we necessarily thought about right I think that you know I don't know if that was sort of in in the forefront of our mind in terms of like but I think that part of the reason we went with we used we worked with Cambridge and we went with Varys was partly because it's like okay let's just sort of we can box this a little bit for ourselves um is part of I think the rationale but like could we have gone with Cambridge absolutely um but that's what felt right for us and I think that this is where um some of those pieces are depends on again what you need um but I mean it's a fair question I just don't think that at the time about you know a year a year and a half ago when we were necessarily thinking in that vein great another question here in the back um hi sorry Lisa Richter of our capital um amazing wonderful discussion I guess I just wanted to emphasize that point of transparency particularly in a market that's evolving where oftentimes um many of us are called on or at least asked to to play different roles and um you know just in terms of our own practice because we are strategy advisors but we also are an RIA and due due diligence and portfolio management and all of that we actually believe that being practitioners informs the way that we provide strategy guidance and that there's value in that but um we have to be willing with our clients to say you know if we give you strategy advice that doesn't mean that we expect that you're going to retain us for anything else and you know we have a responsibility to you to allow you to freely make that choice um the you know the other thing that comes up that I think hasn't really arisen yet in the discussion but it comes up for us as we get asked by um funds to help them strategize and raise capital and all of that and um you know from time to time uh we have engaged very carefully in those kinds of engagements when we felt that our investors really wanted the kind of product that the fund was trying to bring to market and that we could somehow help them think that through and that created hugely onerous disclosure um burdens on us where you know we felt it actually potentially impaired uh our credibility and we felt that we couldn't do that anymore that the only way that we could help develop product really would be on behalf of an investor not on behalf of someone on the demand side of the marketplace so and I just think these are amazing question and just so valuable to continue the discussion so thank you thanks um I think uh there was another question here in the audience thank you um thank you for this panel it's super helpful and I think what the market looks like outside of the US is totally different the level of market depth that we have on the layers of the from the asset owner to the actual impact investment are super different outside of the US so in terms of field building um what can you advise or how can you help advance the field building of the advisory outside of the US um the most recent tonic report uh you know had no advisory in Latin America we feel super lonely in Mexico by the way so any advice any mentoring about that would be very helpful we don't even know you know if we could if we should start as asset managers as advisors because the the vehicles and the entities are not even the same for our markets and the products available aren't there as well so we start with education and from education to take it a step further is it's even hard for the investor to understand what the value of that brings thank you and you're speaking from the perspective of a an intermediate intermediary in the market yes we educate impact investment well impact let's say the new impact investors in Mexico hopefully um and we have helped co-create some funds great great what else we've actually found somewhat counterintuitive that at times especially in emerging markets that the advisory services are somewhat better and more established because i think you've had a long legacy of the dfis and others putting sizable amounts of money to work in those markets and so you've had people who've either been able to build a business grow a business and so it's you know i think here we're sort of on year 10 let's say this journey whereas if you think about sort of you know international development financing it's been going on for decades and so we actually find people often who've got moral clarity more sort of established track records just because it's been going on longer to your point but the messiness starts to resolve a little better interesting and robin i'm curious from the families that you are the peer networks that you've pulled together what are you seeing in terms of global um capacities to connect intermediaries traditionally if you've just looked at the numbers even though about half of impact investments go into emerging markets only about 10 percent of capital originates in emerging markets but that is changing there's obviously a ton of wealth it is closer to the ground is able to do due diligence and management in a much more efficient way by just being there and being local and so i think that's going to completely take off we have a a number of investees from the impact to tonic that are actually expanding their peer-to-peer networks within many of those geographies including in latin america and in asia which i think will be an important resource for families that are that are really pushing the field in in their respective markets and i did want to you know i think i think it's almost inevitable that given that that is where the capital flows are that you're going to see therefore some potential leg in terms of some of the emergence of especially the boutique firms that are serving those markets but i i think that client demand is what drives which i said before and so i think that you know that will change with every family that that asks and begins allocating capital and i just i did want to give a shout out you mentioned the tonic report and that actually might be a great that might be a great asset for a lot of people and resource for people to know about which is they just put out a a report which basically looked at the members of their 100 percent impact network and just said hey who do you use as your advisor and it's you know without any sort of rating or any endorsement it's just a fyi these are some of the folks that are being used by members of the 100 impact network as they're thinking about allocating their entire portfolio towards impact investing it's something like advisors from you go to some of the sources tonic and the 100 impact network it has a very straightforward title so you'll know it when you see it great we've got a question here on the third fourth row i've been in social impact ventures for the last 10 years and if i was to use the analogy of making up a movie i feel a lot of the funds including ones at the up there do a fantastic job with you know writing the story casting bringing the right players and even producing the movie like shooting the film but then you guys and forgive my rudeness muck it up in post-production a lot of what i have seen personally is these young extremely committed dedicated passionate founders not having the operational experience to execute and do the grant work the processes and you know operations hardcore stuff and even after that first round of funding like a series a not being able to attract the talent especially because impact businesses are such an emerging line people from the corporate world who have the experience to do the this detailed work we're not able to come in so my point to in my you know your opinions would be fantastic is if all of you are very clear on which verticals you want to go for a product of health or fisheries would it make sense for you to build the expertise almost as another vertical if you're going to the right of that that diagram and whether it's in-house whether you can afford it to create an in-house team or whether it's intermediaries who can come in and plug in especially in the early stages okay bring in this deep expertise so when these ventures scale up they can hire the right people full-time but at least you know the failure rate that i first hand the front row seat you know for me to see and it's very painful to see so much passion so much energy go to waste maybe there's a space over there as another on the right side for you to do more but you know there's too much emphasis i feel on the left and the right gets ignored and that's where you know you really have to it can have the maximum impact thank you thank you for the comment i think we're obviously focusing the discussion on the the requirements of asset owners and investors but that's an important call out for the needs of investors and the need to further build out the the service provider market there i'm i'm gonna turn to sort of a final reflection from the panelists and really this has been a fabulous discussion and again a very diverse set of perspectives on this i'd love we've heard a lot of different ideas for ways in which we could improve the functioning of the market we're all here to think about how do we get the advisory services to investors that they need so if you can sort of think about you know perhaps not a silver bullet but a parting thought in terms of something that that really could help move the needle in terms of improved functioning of this market from an investor perspective i know robin you've talked about transparency we've talked about pricing we've talked about rfps and asset owner sophistication um but i'd love to hear a single reflection from from all of you as we part john i'll sure i'll start from the philanthropy side i think you know we have the ability to to be patient and part of our role in philanthropy is to be catalytic and to build the infrastructure or the ecosystem so you know i think the advice for asset owners is to be patient and uh if it doesn't exist figure out how to help it build and create that system that can be supportive and become more efficient and effective you know we um when we started our platform there really weren't any intermediaries that had expertise at the depth and level that lumina has in post-secondary education i mean we are probably the largest deepest uh in that space so it wasn't about going to find someone who had that domain expertise because we had it we can get them up to speed the question is can they learn are they hungry are they willing to work with us in a way that could be value-added and so i think for us to be patient to work with our advisors uh i mean originally even before we had started there was a different consulting firm that had no financial experience no philanthropy experience and they were advising how to build an impact investing platform clearly that didn't work out very well so you know that's why you hired me but ultimately i think just being patient and open to developing the ecosystem is what i would advise great thanks john so this is not a silver bullet but a baby step that we're taking in the second half of this year that actually my colleague lauren booker alan is leading on our behalf is a piece that is going to really focus on doing two things for families one is to set out a set of questions that we think it's helpful for families to ask themselves as they are moving towards readiness of beginning to build their team whether that's in-house externally or a combination of the two which we see all the time and then the second really being sharing a set of case studies of you know we often share what's in another family's portfolio but actually just the you know kind of the the wonky oh how did you do that right this conversation that we're having there and and be able to share a few of those and so that will come out later this year and it's meant to be just a baby step in starting to establish what i think you and fran have talked about as as really a roadmap of kind of this is where you start here's the questions you ask along the way you know ideally here's a sense of who you can engage at different points in the process and and we will not get that far but but hopefully it will be one step in that direction fantastic well fran and i love the metaphor of the intermediation of highway so the roadmap is absolutely spot on so for me i think part of it is also you know we're still a relatively small community the affinity groups i think are actually really important for this reason talk to each other ask people who have gone through this process themselves i'm i'm amazed at the people that are like oh i'm starting this i'm like have you just talk to anybody that's been through this and i think finding like-minded institutions that are in similar size that have gone through this experience is critical right you wouldn't go into any new venture and just be like okay i'm going to start calling up service providers and be like hey will you do this for us and i think the amount of time that we spent as an institution talking to peer institutions that have gone through this that they have come in and talked to our board talked to what services they've used why they use them and in those sort of private conversations you get the nuts and bolts what worked and what didn't work in that so i think that going to the affinity groups and saying hey can you connect us with people that have done this before i think it's just you know it's a great way to start yeah great great oh me you know i think we're almost out but uh you know one thing we've done that i don't think again is a silver bullet that's kind of a different way of thinking about things is we've sort of rented the balance sheet and so rather than excuse me looking to sort of find fund managers or deals to invest in we sort of let people bring us things and sort of opened up the channels to actually bring in transactions and so part of this is that part of the answer i think is increasing sort of access so there are a lot of great entrepreneurs great people can underwrite transactions people who have deals who get stuck trying to work through the intermediation and sometimes it's just easier to say look we're open for business yeah great wonderful well please join me in in thanking our panel this is a great conversation