 We can start. Impact investing is one of those concepts that, for skeptical journalists like me, sounds a bit like a contradiction. How can it be, as we will discuss today, that investment can meet a triple bottom line, economic, social, and environmental? Aren't profit margins supposed to come at the expense of social and environmental gains? But we have five people here today who I believe will convince us that it is possible to create both financial returns and positive social and environmental impact. A few numbers just to set a little bit of context. In 2012, Impact Investing garnered $8 billion in committed capital, and the median investment was about $25 million. Today, there are only around 200 impact investment specific funds, but this is obviously a growth field. Governments in particular are committed to expanding the social impact of their investments. The UK Pension Fund, for instance, by the end of next year, hopes that about half of its holdings will involve impact investment. And forecasts, which of course are infinitely fungible, put the impact investment at anywhere from $500 billion to $1 trillion by 2020. So that's the good news. The challenge in doing all of this is quite significant. First of all, this can't be simply the business of international finance institutions or of foundations or of rich people who want to save the world. You really have to get mainstream investors involved. And governments also really need to create a climate that's more conducive to such investing and figure out the proper regulatory framework to protect investments. And finally, we need to figure out how to measure this triple bottom line, the way that you measure economic impact and environmental impact and social impact and they're very different. So here to discuss these issues with us today are five people who either are committing to financial impact investment or people who analyze this growth market. And I thought what we would do is just have a very quick introduction from each of the panelists, who they are or what they do. I'll start with Keeley Stevenson, on my right, who is the CEO of Bamboo Finance, which is a global private equity firm that invests in growth stage businesses in 25 countries. Thank you, Mingalaba, who's in here. And I just want to quickly say to your point of how could this be about the balancing or why, basically why not? We live in a world where it's demanding now that we create these types of businesses to create the world we wanna live in. So Bamboo Finance, we started in 2007 and with the intent to improve the lives of low income people. We decided to use an approach of private equity. So we launched two commercial private equity funds. We raised $250 million and we've invested almost all of this in businesses that improve the lives of low income people in areas like healthcare, energy, water resources, housing. We have two private equity funds and our investors are a range. Initially started off with individuals, high net worth individuals, family offices. We also have investors that are a pension fund, a sovereign wealth fund, and it's quite global. So investors are pretty much from all parts of the world. As Hannah mentioned, we have 46 investments in 25 countries. And we have five offices around the world and a team of 29 people. And it's only been six years, so it's still fairly early on in terms of performance of these companies. We have had some significant indicators that there's a great social impact. We've also had one exit. So we'll have a 23% IRR return from that exit and we have two more in the horizon in the next year or so. And now that we've almost fully invested these two funds, we've decided to launch two new ones and one is focused all on energy for the base of pyramid or low income communities and the other is an extension of our first fund which is all focused on financial inclusion. So including things like microfinance, which our colleague here does, and financial service platforms, things like that. So our thesis really is that serving low income people with dignity, with a market approach is no more risky or costly than any other market. And it's actually a really huge opportunity to create the world that we all wanna live in. And bamboo, where did that name come from? Bamboo actually is a symbolic, you know, it means it's auspicious in many cultures, but it's also quite resilient and grows anywhere and it's quite alive and so I think that's very representative of our team and our commitment to that which is natural and which will grow under extreme circumstances. And you're wearing bamboo green. That's right, I'm decked out in our uniform. That's fantastic. Don Lam is the CEO and co-founder of Viennep Capital Group in Vietnam and I believe that you're also beginning to explore the Myanmar market as well. Yes, just a little bit about who we are. We're about nine years old. We currently manage about $1.5 billion across a number of asset class. Our fund are closed and listed in London and our current focus is Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and we are setting up an office in Myanmar. We also run a foundation called Viennep Capital Foundation which is one of the largest foundation NGO in Vietnam. So from that and also from investor that invests our current fund with the request of us looking into impact investment that's why we're here and it's a process of us setting up a new impact investment fund and we'll talk about it more about it later. Chris Dagelmeyer, Dagelmeyer? Dagelmeyer, I'm sorry, it's good. I also went in between those two pronunciations is the Executive Director of the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University and you've been living in Myanmar since December. Correct, so I'm here with two hats. One, as you mentioned, is the Executive Director for the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford which is relevant to what we'll talk about impact investing. I have been on loan to another Institute at Stanford living in Yangon here since December focused on innovation and developing economies. So the Center for Social Innovation because that's where we drive most of our thought and research and ideas around impact investing is focused at social change at the intersection of business, government, and nonprofits. We're fanatical about it. We've looked at social innovations that have scaled the past 30 years and it's those that happen at that intersection that are able to grow. So those are new novel ideas that are more effective and efficient than existing ideas and that drive public value. As an academic center, we do three things. Raise awareness, build skills, and inspire action. It's not enough anymore to just know about what to do. It's about driving action on the ground and we do what traditional academic centers do, research, cases, courses. I've got three courses on impact investing. And so that's my hat on social innovation and then this Institute. My job has been really in factories on the ground seeing what the opportunities are here in Myanmar. So we can talk about that too. And Andy Tafan Garuda Putro is the founder of Amarta Microfinance which is a Grameen-based microfinance operation that focuses on affordable financial services in low-income rural areas in Indonesia. Yeah, correct. Okay, just a brief about my organization. So it just started three years ago. We started as a small project. I started with not a big investment actually. I started with a thousand US dollar. It's quite small. And then today we have reached to 3,000 clients, more than 50 affiliates who already serve and we manage outstanding portfolio out of 300,000 US dollars with zero defaults. So we can manage all the investment, all the loans effectively. And the nice thing about the microfinance that we do here, it started just a simple microfinance scheme that it's effective way to address poverty. But then if we talk about in like country in Indonesia it's things become an important tool to address issue like poverty because in Indonesia, total population we have 240,000 million people. But then 100 million people still living below poverty line. So it's gonna be an important tool to address this kind of social issues. And that's the reason why I started this kind of microfinance things. And finally Omar Lodi is the partner in Singapore based regional head for the Abrage Group. And I was reading that in 2008 you had introduced a proprietary bespoke index to measure the development impact of investments. Tell us more. So we're a traditional private equity firm, for profit. And we operate only across what we call growth markets or emerging markets, Africa, Latin America, Asia, Amina. And while for profit and we manage seven and a half billion we have over I guess 150 portfolio companies or partner companies as we call them. And where by for profit remains the central mantra of our objective and our investors, we pay equal credence and importance to long-term sustainability practices within our partner companies because we feel that the two are synonymous and go hand in hand. And profit maximization is not possible without sustainability practices across all your economic and corporate activities. And the index which we can talk about later is there to actually measure the impact because it's all very well talking about these things and trying to implement practices. But if you don't measure your impact then you're not going to sort of be able to improve upon it. I thought maybe what we could do now is talk more specifically about the projects that you're involved in, the challenges, the opportunities. Kili, if I could circle back to you on this. Yeah, our portfolio is quite diverse. So we have some examples would be we have a large investment in the first student loan business in Mexico. We also have an investment in India that's a rice husk, they use the byproduct of rice husk in order to electrify rural villages. Another example is a healthcare company in South Africa that has been around for a long time and as a very large group they have managed care, which is networks of doctors and dentists and laboratories. They have a pharmaceutical manufacturing business and distribution company and HIV management company. And although there's huge social impact in this kind of business, it's not the typical type of thing that we would invest in unless there was a direct impact on low income communities. So in this example, the company actually created a low cost product for workers in like mining manufacturing who don't have access to affordable healthcare. So for about $20, which they share with their employer, so they pay about $10. They get unlimited primary care doctor's visits, acute and chronic drugs. So that includes things like HIV or diabetes treatment, dentistry and optometry, which is quite critical for a lot of people that are. So the reason that this was impossible is actually because that company had economies of scale already. And for us the really interesting thing is that they also have many middle income clients as well that they're serving. And as a healthcare company, they're looking at a significant amount of data and they have a strong MIS system. So they're actually able to compare the utilization of low income clients with middle income clients and they're finding almost no difference in the sense that they're no riskier, no more expensive, with the exception of dentistry because mostly low income clients hadn't been to the dentist most of their life. And so the initial cost of coming to the dentist is a little bit higher. In a couple of other examples there and in healthcare, we've also invested in the largest and first chain of rural and semi-urban hospitals in India. And it's also another young global leader colleague of mine, Ashwin, who started this. And their model is quite interesting because what they decided to do in 2009, we invested $4 million and they had four hospitals and now they're at 17 hospitals. And these are in very remote areas where people would typically have to walk or to travel anyways, about 100 kilometers to actually get access to a hospital. They have OBGYN services, they have surgery, they have a pharmacy, diagnostics. And their whole model is finding local talent. They have nursing and training services for nurses locally. They procure all of their supplies jointly which keeps the costs down and their asset light so they're not actually buying, building facilities, they're leasing some of these facilities. But the key thing between all of these enterprises is that the entrepreneurs know really, really well these customers. So in the case of Lausalia, the key thing is that they know what the services are that the customers are looking for but also the doctors are trained on aspects of how to communicate with the, they're on the local radio, they're in the health camps. It's about that feeling of kind of oneness with the client that has made them very successful. So that's it. Just to give you with some examples of our portfolio. Omar, you know when you think about impact investment, often health, education, microfinances are naturals but you could argue that there are other types of investment that have deep social and environmental impacts and I believe that there's something in Pakistan that you're working on on power generation which fits a sort of a slightly non-traditional mode of impact investing. If you wouldn't mind elaborating on that. I mean firstly, we invest across all sectors and we probably invested, there's not a single industry we haven't invested in and some sectors obviously the ability to sort of make more social impact is greater power generation being one of them so it's a good case study to talk about but at the heart of every company lies a whole set of stakeholders and we believe that by adopting that stakeholder approach and not a single shareholder approach that is how you are able to build sustainable businesses which take all of those three or multiple boxes, right? And it can be in any industry, it can be in any sector, it can be in any country. So at the core of it lies the stakeholder approach. The second important mantra for us is that sometimes we all make ESG a black box, right? We have panel sessions like this on it not to de-rate this panel session but it's also organizations, of course some of us, it's a cosmetic tick box exercise, others embrace it but it's not part of mainstream business. It's actually, it's everyday living. I was telling you before the panel, we as human beings we educate ourselves, we look after our health, we try and sort of elongate our living and make us good human beings do good. It's exactly the same parallel that you take for a company. And if our goal is to maximize profit, which it is, over the long term, if you're not gonna treat your customers well, your employees well, your environmental well, environmental well, you are not going to, over the long term, sustain and maximize your profit. And where we have a five to 10 year horizon, it's not just about the period in which we run that business, when we come to sell that business, the incoming buyer has to be equally attracted to pay us maximum value. So it's a very long term and it has to be necessarily a long term objective. KSC, Karachi Electric Supply Corporation, is a utility power generation distribution transmission asset servicing the city of Karachi, which is 18 million people. So it's a little unique, it was a government asset which was privatized in 05. It was a broken asset. It's stakeholders, the government, its employees, its customers, retail customers, business customers, the media, the community, they all hated KSC. Inside, it was completely corrupt. It was eroded, they were unionized, politicized. It had 40% transmission and distribution losses. It hadn't made a profit for the last 15 years of its life and there was no, not surprisingly, Karachi was without electricity for several hours in the day. For all our sins and whatever we were thinking, we came in with a management controlling stake. And because we saw a very simple financial goal and solution, the 40% TND losses were causing the profit. If you reduce those, for every 1% reduction in TND, you could increase EBITDA by $15 million. However, as simple as that may sound, turning around KSC with all of these embedded stakeholders who had an extremely long, dispassionate, sour relationship with the company was not going to be easy, 18,000 employees, by the way. So if we didn't adopt a stakeholder approach, there was never going to be any way that we were going to succeed. And the stakeholder approach and the for-profit approach were unanimous and synonymous and complimentary in most of cases. We increased generation by 1,000 megawatts. That obviously improved power supply and we reduced TND losses. It improved power supply to the community, to the city, increased economic activity. We targeted 16 hospitals which accounted for 80% of medical treatment in Karachi, gave them uninterrupted power supply. We went into the community. We built sporting facilities for the youth to give them empowerment. We, the flood, Pakistan had a very unfortunate flood. We treated about 30,000 of the victims. With our employees, we started training. We started HSC practices. We brought down injuries by 20% year on year. With the media, customer care didn't exist. Simple stuff that until we didn't increase generation capacity, there was load shedding. By simply telling households that when the load shedding would happen, we improved their lives tremendously. They could plan around the load shedding. Customer care didn't exist. Customer care centers didn't exist. We rehabilitated those. We brought in new employees. We painted the dump. We made them pleasant places to come. We actually picked up phones and trained people to provide basic things which we all take for granted, they just didn't exist. It took us two, three years to win over different stakeholders. I mean, our biggest, the business people wouldn't pay us bills. The army, the government would pay us bills. We cut off their electricity, right? Much to our peril. But today, KESC, all of these financial, all of these changes that I just outlined, the financial impact has been tremendous. We maximized in fiscal year 12 our highest ever profitability that KESC has ever achieved, $188 million in EBITDA. We have, through the 1000 megawatts of addition, we have probably McKinsey estimates a billion to $2 billion of economic enhancement annually in Karachi's economy. And none of this, none of this could have been possible without a multi-stakeholder embedded approach, which continues to be the case even today. I mean, Don, your history has been more in traditional investments, but now you're looking at different options. You mentioned two projects to me earlier. One is training street kids in Vietnam in terms of FNB investment, and then a project in Cambodia, which has to do with water treatment. Those are more sort of traditional, if you will, investments compared to what Omar is talking about. Yeah, you're right. I mean, our traditional business, which is our core business, is really just private equity investment for profit. But as we move along, we came across a number of smaller projects with really high social impact. And on top of that, we actually started getting investor or L.P. into our main fund, saying, hey, we're investing in your main fund, but by the way, my family office, we wanna do something more helpful or high impact. So we actually start this out as more on an accidental basis because we have people requesting us to do it, and because our foundation also do a lot of work in this area, but instead of giving away money, it's not sustainable. So we just sort of married these two together and we're starting this new fund. And the two project that we're looking at now as basically our first two project, one is actually having a training center really for street kids or kids with high risk, where we give them training in mostly F and B, or hospitality, and then we will then place them in hotel, restaurant, and so on and so forth, and mostly waiter, waiters, smaller skill training in English. So basically, we find that this is a really major impact where you're taking kids off the street, off drugs, and off all the bad stuff and moving to a really career path. And once they're given an opportunity, we find that these are one of the best performers. When we go back to the hotel and the restaurant, we ask them, these are the kids that work the hardest, and they have a new mission in life. So we find this is really rewarding. So that's one project where we take kids off the street, train them and place them with employment and they'll be more accountable and responsible. The other project we're looking at in Cambodia that's quite interesting is actually run by an entrepreneur. And what he does is he built a small micro water treatment plant, which said this is local in Cambodia. It's a small company, a small enterprise in Cambodia that is not really a high tech, but it's very basic water treatment, small water treatment plant, essentially providing clean water to this village, initially that's how it started. Because this village doesn't have access to clean water. And people get sick all the time when using the dirty water. And so they solid this and become very, I wouldn't say very profitable, but profitable. Typically, each one of these water treatment plants serve us about 5,000 households. And it costs about $300 to actually serve one household. And you can make money back in about five years or so, which is a pretty good return. But the key here is that you reduce the number of sickness in the village, and people actually have access to clean water. And we thought that's a great idea. And so that's the second project we're looking at in Cambodia. And this is through the foundation part of? This would be a new social impact investment fund, not our regular fund. But it would be run by our foundation with the support of our investment team on the regular investment side. Andy, your focus is on microfinance, particularly with women issues. You just said that you had a 0% default rate, which is really remarkable. Tell us more how you accomplished that. Yeah. Actually, what we do in Amarta, in Amarta Microfinance, we provide a really small-scale loan, $100 US dollar loan for poor women in rural. And we invite them to make a group, just like a Gram and Group Lending model. And then we train them, and we inform them if this loan is not just about the... Sorry. It's OK. Now we know what we're going to buy for them. Yeah, the loan is not just about the money, and then they should give us back the money. But this is also a chance for them to make a purpose for their life. And that's what we really want to educate about how we address issues. We're not only just about talking about access to finance, but then we need to go beyond that. Like, yeah, we educate more about financial planning and participation for other services, like healthcare or environment education and it's also part of the way we make a sustainable impact for, like, yeah, to address these kind of social issues. Chris, if you can give us a little bit of an academic perspective on this, you know, the metric issue. How do you quantify these three aspects, which is economic, environmental, social? Is there an index? How do you... You know, this is research that you've been working on. I have to stand up, because I just feel so guilty for this group right here. So I'm gonna do an academic stand right now. So one of the benefits of being in academia is I get to hear all the complaints from the investee about their investors. And I get to hear what the investors are really looking at and I get to work with the intermediaries. So I'm gonna talk about it from that perspective. And right now I kind of see two camps. There's those investing who are making it happen. And then there's those sitting on the sidelines, kind of like you all maybe, that are looking to impact investing as an opportunity. And that's what my comments are gonna be targeted to. So I'll get to your metrics, but what I really wanna focus on is I see two reoccurring themes in the impact investing field. And the first theme is you need to take trade-offs seriously. If the markets could solve the social problems, wouldn't it have happened by now? And I know people don't wanna hear that. But there's two types of investors I see. There's the financial return first investor and under no circumstance will they take a lower rate. I also believe there's many opportunities and have seen these opportunities for impact first investors who are willing to take a lower rate for a larger social impact in particular cases. And as an investor, you need to really look at those trade-offs and have those conversations with your board and your investors and figure out where you are wanting to invest. Cause I think we're kidding ourselves to say that we can change the world and make a bunch of money at the same time. And then the second point back to metrics, the other reoccurring theme that I see is the social return on investment is never going to be as simple to calculate as a financial return on investment. And there's two reasons for that. One is what we forget about in the philanthropic world, motivations are driven by your values. So some people care about young children, other people care about climate change. It's really hard to compare a carbon offset to saving a child's life and a social return on investment. And I don't think we'll ever be able to do that. So one is personal values and then the second is the timeframe. And I think this is really important for investors who are moving into this social return on investment space. What you've got to be careful of, there are some social interventions that at year one look great and at year five, you should have invested in something else if you really wanted the social impact. And so in this hyper world of quarterly returns, investments and exits, a lot of the social impact isn't gonna happen till five, 10 years, sometimes a decade. And again, so who you're working with and your investors, you need to have that conversation first around how you really wanna think of the social return, what your timeframe is. And I'll wrap up, when you think of your market expectations, I think it's good to match those with the market that you're serving. So again, there are plenty of opportunities to have a great financial return, have social value and have environmental value, but sometimes that's not the case too. So I've got a little one page at the end, I'll hand out. I really think it's a continuum of impact investing and they just be smart and strategic and thoughtful of where you wanna be on that continuum. But if it gets bundled into one unknown dark matter, it doesn't move forward. And I think that we see that a lot in the field right now. It's a little bit stalled and so we need to move these conversations forward. And on the measuring the social returns where I see interest in movement right now is going vertical. It's getting people to go much deeper either on energy, on education and health and just get past that you can compare across some of these issue areas. And so I've seen some companies and micro insurance doing some really interesting work around measuring deeply. And so with that, those are kind of the general comments. I mean, we have people here who are on all sides of the spectrum that you're mentioning. And Omar, you mentioned this idea of a very broad tent in which you have on the one hand a personal moral value that you place on certain types of investment that you make. And that's something that naturally we should all have. But there is ultimately a trade-off that comes, isn't there, between these two sides or convince me otherwise? I'm not saying always, but I'm saying in some cases. And so what I wanna be clear is I think one of the weaknesses of impact investing was thinking I can solve every social and environmental problem without a trade-off and I don't believe that's true. And there's many examples where you've had to underwrite some of these ideas for three or five years before they spin off to for profit. So I don't wanna be kind of misspoken because I do think there's some, especially in energy and some of these, there's great opportunity. I think the trade-off is more in terms of not absolute return, but timing. Short-termism versus long-termism. If you're running a company for the long-term, then I think that trade-off is really very, very minimal. I agree. I actually think, although sometimes there's a trade-off, I would say in the work that, in the focus that we've had, often there's not. There hasn't been because as the investments that we're intentionally choosing involve a longer-term commitment from us as private equity, then the luxury is that we actually have several years to grow with the business and develop those markets. And just to kind of give maybe just to delve into a little bit of an example is that in Mozambique, for example, the government of Mozambique was having significant problems with vaccines not being kept cold. So the cold chain into very rural areas. Our company and our portfolio was created. It was two non-profit organizations, created a commercial business, a for-profit company, and they are distributing propane or LPG in a supply chain that supports vaccine refrigeration systems, essentially. They now are going into the household market where most people are cooking with charcoal and wood and they're having upper respiratory disease and carbon emissions and all the like. Our interest in investing in that company at the time we did was actually because there's no other LPG company interested in being pretty much anywhere outside of the capital in that country. And so we actually see there's a huge opportunity to serve a significant number of people in a very meaningful way and convince an oil or gas company that this is where they should be in the future. And so similar to that timing comment is that what we've seen already is actually vaccine coverage for the population that they're serving that's gone from 58% to 98%. In terms of quality of life enhancements, this is huge. This is in a one-year period. What was that? In a one-year period. And that was over a four-year period. And in terms of potential financial benefit and in the household market as well, there's some great data around that. But in terms of the financial benefit, we're hoping to eventually either sell this company to an oil or gas or some interest that could continue to serve it efficiently or to someone who's interested in the distribution channels to those markets in ways that can distribute things that are important to those populations, those consumers and that actually provide real services that can do it more efficiently now. So I think what we're trying to do is actually change systems, change the thinking that's traditionally there. And I think there's a lot of opportunity to make a financial profit at the same time you're having the impact that you'd like to. And at the end of the day, I mean, we're facing huge problems in this world. I mean, these are very serious issues that we have to, that are calling us immediately and the complacency around that is just no longer, we just can't continue to face a world like this. So what we've got to do is use all the resources we can. Governments and philanthropic organizations are not enough to solve these problems. They're extremely important but they're not enough. We have to be able to take commercial or private capital and channel it into solving some of these problems and use the market engine to do that. I mean, Don, you followed a slightly different model which is a more traditional investment group and then you focused on the foundation sides and seeding smaller impact investments. Yeah, well, I mean, we look at a lot smaller business investment, typically a couple hundred thousand dollar type of investment where we would see the business. Again, also the trade off term is timing also because in our traditional business, we typically funding growth capital or a company that got growing whereas this particular case, typically we would say for the training class, we would fund a couple hundred thousand dollar or whatever it is to just to build up the training center. We know we're gonna make money in the first few years but that's fine. We know that we'll return the money maybe in the fifth or six years or whatever it is but it is something that we accept that you will not make money in the first few years. In our traditional business, that's a no go. If somebody give you that business plan and say forget it, that's not gonna happen. So, yeah, it's a different approach. Timing-wise and the impact investment culture that's coming in would say, well, you have to set this up and it doesn't matter we lose money for the first few years as long as you make it back over time and that investment is sustainable. But that's also the luxury of having a side of the business which is already successful and they can subsidize it for a certain amount of time. I wanted to switch a little bit to the country we're in because I think we're all interested in the future of Myanmar and it's a country that's been dubbed the wild east of the wild frontier capital. The truth of course is that not much investment is coming and there's a lot of interest in investment but we're still at that sort of waiting stage and the challenges for the country whether it's less than one third electrification, high poverty rate, 70% rural population, the fact that the average student only studies for four years in school. I mean, these are significant challenges for Myanmar but there are also you could argue some opportunities for the country which is that it's sort of starting on a very low base and foreign investment laws are coming through. Legislation is being written as we speak and I wondered if any of you had suggestions from your own experiences in these different countries as to how regulatory frameworks in Myanmar can be put together. And I know Andy that you had when we conversed earlier had some frustrations with the model with Indonesian governance and maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how that might be able to, what sort of advice you could give to those of the room who are thinking about these issues specifically for Myanmar. Okay. My lessons from Indonesia about the, yeah, about our business in social enterprise and we are really focused on the mission for poverty alleviations. But then we see that if we really want to commit it and dedicate our time to this social purpose, we really have to make the organization sustained and it cannot be possible if we want to make the organization sustained with the donation or we are waiting for charity or we only fundraising for every year we need new donation, new donation. It won't happen and it will make the organization stress and of course for that. And in issue like in the nation like we need government to support this kind of help the organization that really want to address social issues besides investment to focus on the business growth but also investment to make an impact for addressing social issues. And we can ensure that beside the investment only for the business, investment for addressing social issue also will give a yeah it will make the yeah this we can make the society more the welfare of the society is also improving because of the we also focus on that kind of issues. And then like our government also we need to change the mindset of our government and also maybe because we are the business people here and we are open minded and forward looking we need to change like if we want to solve or we want to address critical issues, social issue environment, social economics we cannot always depend and rely on NGO, international NGO or from the local community but we need to see this as a part of the business. So we can make sure that although we want to have some profit from them from that but the missions of the social purpose is also run in the right track. I think that. And do you think that there should be separate standards that these two types of investment should be held to? And if so, what can the government do to try to balance those two? In my opinion, what island from my country we don't have that kind of standard they have a set of standard for differentiate between impact investment or business investment but I agree if we should give more edit value for everyone who interested for the impact investment maybe like any kind of tax free or more easier in process of investment bureaucracy more flexible or that kind of solution might be happen or Chris you would like to add more. Well I can talk maybe just briefly on opportunities here a bit in Myanmar and again knowing it's really limited compared to the people who live here all the time. So I will say the common theme right now is NATO no action talk only and whether they're the ministers there's just a lot more talk than there is action and for various reasons it still is a risky country to come into but from an investment standpoint I would reiterate that match your investment with the market you're serving. What Myanmar needs right now is entrepreneurship and business growth. They've got a buffer their resource curse and how economies grow out of poverty is building a middle class through entrepreneurship and if I look at a lot of impact investors that come in with all their criteria and check boxes I'm like then don't bother because the starting base is at a different point here. I've been I spent a lot of time in factories and there are sparks going and they're in their flip flops and t-shirts and but they have their safety goggles on and so for their business owner they've made progress. I think the business opportunities the business owners I've met are heroic. They've launched these business under incredible circumstances and to be competitive it should be the first voice of impact investing right now and with that you'll get social and environmental so on what I would say the continuum is just focus on business and competitiveness and of course you're gonna follow there environmental regulations and things like that. In terms of regulation, the country has many other fish to fry than worrying about different regulation for impact investing. They just need to get good money in here that's treating the people well and investing in the country. That's just my opinion. Just to follow up I mean you've been in Yangon for a few months even in that time you've seen more landrovers on the streets. There's more building. The hotels are full. It hasn't necessarily translated into a significant increase in investment in the country. There's Yangon and then there's the rest of the country and I think that's the big delta right there. So yeah I think the people's lives in Yangon of having just access to transportation which they didn't, cars have doubled in the last 18 months so for those of you who are stuck in traffic like myself but what I find fascinating literally you just need to go 30 minutes out of you're still technically in Yangon but out of the city center and you're in the industrial zones and that's where you need to take a drive around the factories where there is no electricity and there aren't those cars and again there in lies a lot of opportunity. In countries like this there is inevitably hype, euphoria, excitement, all the investors come in wow this is the new hot place to invest and then inevitably investor fatigue, unrealized expectations. How concerned are you about that in the Myanmar case? Well I think investment's gonna come in in natural resources no matter what. That train is gonna leave the track. I think I've met some small private equity investors that I think are and they've been investing in Asia for 20, 30 years in Indonesia and Vietnam. I think those investors who know what it's like to invest in Asia or have a huge role to play here in Myanmar right now and I just I would say come in small do your due diligence, don't necessarily listen to all the expert reports because all they've done is probably interview people and unless they've been to the factory they've tested something, I wouldn't put a lot of credibility. And Don you've have. Just want to touch on that. I mean two things right on the regulation based on the Vietnam experience I would just keep one single FDI law. But make it simple so for the investor will follow. But what Vietnam did was that on the top of the phone direct investment law they have something called the poor area rule area tax incentive. So it's a blanket thing. If you are investing in certain area of Vietnam like the mountainous area or near the border where it's very, very poor you get tax incentive. That's it. That's one way to encourage people just to go to invest. So that's where impact investment come into play because you will invest in those area anyway. The second point about the hot money. I mean I don't want to compare Vietnam and Myanmar but essentially Vietnam gone through the same similar process in early 1990 when the model was lifted after the Vietnam War is closed. So that is the same process a lot of money coming in and it will come in and until certain period of time we will be corrected. And investor like us who invest in the frontier market been here for about 20 years or so then we see those and you're trying to avoid area where hot money are coming in and always it's gonna be the real estate that come up first and then the rest will follow. Yeah because investors at the end of the day are heard, right? We just sort of clamor in and everybody is just mesmerized by the opportunity Myanmar is to give all sorts of analogies China, mini China 1989 is that the other and it is a very unique opportunity and it's history in making 60 million people all the resources sizable in its own right but it'll happen gradually and that's not a bad thing but the local government over here they have a clean slate, right? There are a lot of people out there who want to help them whether it's with their parliament whether it's with their investment laws and other things like that and they're reaching out for help and that's something that they should do they should put in place I agree with Don simple, transparent, robust regulatory policies and frameworks and policy frameworks where investors can say these are gonna be there in the long term and hopefully they will not be political change and meddling. I mean and you know there's a long way to go there are always going to be local groups which are gonna be resistant to change, right? Who have been benefiting over the last sort of decade or so but these are all sort of part and parcel of the challenges that me and Ma will go through that other countries have gone through and hopefully they can now learn being part of ASEAN 2015 and 2015 is a very meaningful date for ASEAN with the opening up of capital labor and trade flows they can learn from a lot of the mistakes that ASEAN made and went through. I just wanted to ask one more question before we open up for the audience but you were mentioning earlier the importance of investing in diversity not just in terms of sectors but also in terms of gender diversity and the impact, social impact that can come from doing that. Did you wanna just? Sure yeah I think one of the themes globally that's come up in extreme importance actually I think is the actual benefit in productivity of a company with diversity in general and an organization I'm involved with is called ASTIA that's been supporting women-led businesses based in Silicon Valley but women-led businesses globally they've raised about a billion dollars for women-led businesses are finding basically that one women-led businesses are tending to be in terms of performance more likely to have an exit as an IPO have higher rounds of next valuations be more profitable ventures and part of this is essentially that diversity matters it's not that one gender is necessarily better than the other et cetera it's just that bringing more perspective to major decision making roles in a company it matters and so around the globe we're starting to see much more data around what that looks like and including data that's showing that actually women-led startups or those with women on executive teams tend to be focused on businesses at least two thirds of them that are focused on social or environmental output in some way so they're really entrepreneurship in the public interest finding where those opportunities are in the market to do that, to find those synergies for both the financial benefit and others as well as in terms of kind of the financial or profit algorithm of the business is tied directly to those social outcomes and Myanmar seems to have a head start on the diversity scale because what Serge Boone was saying yesterday in one of the sessions was that women are very much at the forefront both in the household and in the workplace he was saying that he's got 50 branch managers and 42 are women so let's... In terms of gender equality, Myanmar has it made and that's certainly something that in what you're doing it's focused so much on women and the results Yeah, if we like to invest in a woman and invest in doing microfinance things it's not just access to microfinance it's for televisions, woman empowerment and play a greater role of women in the family they can earn income so they can just play a greater role in the family All right, I'm sure that everybody here has better questions than I do so maybe we can open it up for questions if you could please identify yourself and keep your comments relatively brief so that we can have more people involved in the discussion One there too I'm Alan Minor with Sunbridge out of Tokyo we've been investing in Japanese startups since 2000 we're also instrumental with some local organizations in promoting the area of social entrepreneurship from then and sort of looking at it broadly in the society and where it can be deployed my question for this particular type of fund though is how do you actually implement and exit for Marventure Fund selling a for-profit company to a larger for-profit company is a very natural transition in terms of goal alignment IPOs are a possibility and so I'm curious with, even with trade-offs how do you produce a return at all for investors? The philanthropic donations are American that's an easy financial algorithm to play it's tax-beneficial to me to make donations and there are things like orchestras and museums that did not come up in the conversation today as possible targets for a venture so two questions one is how do you implement an exit without destroying the impact of what you had created up to that point and secondly where sort of the borderline where do you see the borderline between philanthropic donations supporting key initiatives in society versus social venturing Questions for anyone that I think Chris you may have some questions and I'm curious with Kelly if you had an exit Yeah so I'll be the not the skeptic but back to hearing all the struggles of exit so in a previous life in early 2000 in Silicon Valley if people remembered the dot-com boom that busted we launched a social purpose incubator but one of the companies made it actually a few did and just recently that you know their investors who invested in their social venture needed to get out and the reality is it was just finding new social venture funds to kind of replace it can they be it's a real estate hotel employment model so is really a Marriott going to buy them probably not so I think that's one I think you talked to Jacqueline Novogratz with Acumen fund and a number of their companies are really struggling with what an exit looks like in terms of I think the most common will be acquisition I don't know any maybe you know that or even close to kind of being an IPO with the exception of I'll hand out this continuum what is really more just good CSR you know good like Ben and Jerry's or Patagonia but they're not doing a product that's actually serving the poor so I unfortunately don't have an answer to your question and I think it's the big question for the field right now and luckily we've got places like bamboo finance that over hopefully the next five years are going to be starting to have examples of those that we can kind of learn from to share with kind of investors when they think about it so I think it's an excellent question and I think our I mentioned earlier about system changing and that example I think there are very large national corporations and multinational corporations that are actually looking for growth opportunities and desperately looking for these kind of opportunities but are not willing to invest now in the development of those markets and I do think that it's going to take a few years and that that will actually be a very important way we don't just transform you know a few of these enterprises that are relatively small but we transform very large machines that somewhat puppeteer in many of our lives our experience has been only one exit as I said in a microfinance institution in Mongolia and you know over the long term I think we will see a small percentage of our portfolio list on local stock exchanges I think there are definitely a few that are looking to list on whether it's Johannesburg Stock Exchange or Leston in India etc and that are actually very viable for the public market others will you know be acquired others might not survive but are worth the you know the experiment and the learning we have had signals in our portfolio where new investors came in after us at higher valuation and they're not all impact investors to that point actually some of which are very traditional private equity investors or local investors that are seeing this as an opportunity and willing to pay a premium to our last round as well so in terms of you know how our fund is valued etc it has the net asset value is increasing and everything more or less is still alive which is good in some cases but you know I think we still have a long ways to go for the field overall the implication of that though is actually this is our funds are demonstration funds in the sense right we want to show that there are you know billions or trillions of dollars of opportunity to be operating businesses like these and that's going to take institutional investors to put money into these type of funds and to support the intermediaries here and that's not happening yet I mentioned we have one pension fund we have a sovereign wealth fund with those who are investing beyond job creation so not just SME investing it's very limited to find impact investing institutional investors in those impact investment funds and so that's the goal is to prove that we've got a track record in the next couple of years and then hopefully it speaks for itself there's a gentleman back there Hello my name is Hong Kong economist of the National League for Democracy yes I'd like to ask you my personal questions this is my curious questions even though I want to ask the opinions of all candidates about the impacts of potential breakdowns of the investments and the impact of the investments even if the constitution does not allow our leader to end the coming 2015 presidential elections I would like to know your opinions yet this is just my personal questions thank you very much just to I think provide context in 2011 there will be parliamentary elections the current constitution has provisions in it that preclude Anson Sochi who is the head of the National League for Democracy to run as president the constitution will have to change for that to happen and that may be a difficult process so I think that's what he's referring to there is a big political change that will be happening in 2015 and for all the laws and regulations that are being put into place now it's not clear what will happen in 2015 and a lot of foreign investors are waiting until the end of 2015 to see what's happening with social stability before they bring their full-time investment in so you're looking at Myanmar does the 2015 issue concern you? in a way but not significant mainly because the two sectors that we look at in Myanmar at the moment is mainly agricultural but value-added agricultural not plantation the other one is tourism mainly in hotel because we own eight hotels in Vietnam and we also own a number of agricultural value-added type of company in Vietnam and we know that Vietnamese agricultural technology is very very good and we want to bring it to Myanmar and so with those very two basic sector that we're focusing on I believe that whether the significant change or not in 2015 any administration will support those two sector because it's poverty alleviation it's employment providing and it's very basic and again our allocation to Myanmar at the moment is quite limited it's not a huge amount of money and so it's a good way to sort of test at the same time go into a sector that we don't think politically will have any impact because you look like you're about to... well I would just add on to that I think there's opportunity to be an early entrant right now while the other people are waiting until 2015 you can come in and start finding the good companies and the good distribution channels and then I'm optimistic it's gonna go smooth I don't know about the constitution amendment I'm just talking about stability of a transition of government so I can't talk to the latter well this is exactly you know frontier investor like us will work and we are based in Vietnam we're investing in Laos and Cambodia so Myanmar I mean whatever we've seen before it wouldn't be that much different right? My name is Jack Sim I'm the founder of the World Toilet Organization The best name Yeah, the other digital UTO Yes Given that a lot of impact investors are waiting for a late stage success model who is going to farm and support the early stage and to bring them so that they are late stage to fund that's the first question and the other is is there a role for a social stock exchange given that there is no speculative motive you already have funds so yeah this are my two questions I think given the nature of opportunities in Myanmar where you know not much exists and there's the opportunity to build an investor across the board you will see a lot of investors you know who traditionally don't do startup or green field financing taking that route because I think the ramp up periods are going to be a lot faster we're not talking about traditional you know technology, VC, etc the supply side just doesn't exist so the opportunity is there and I think we'll all come in on that basis also whatever does exist I think in many cases you know many of the sort of more established business groups so some of them at least are still on the sanctions list so many of us can't invest with them etc and need to find that for local partners is important with respect to this exchange idea I mean there was a exchange a social enterprise exchange that was set up in Singapore as a social sort of cause and exercise and the reason that that hasn't garnered success is there's a sort of classic chicken and egg situation in the sense that because in Asia generally speaking you've got a tremendous high net worth community who want to do impact investing the absorption capacity in Southeast Asia alone is anywhere you know 150, 200 billion and north infrastructure transportation I mean no no death of opportunity and investor and opportunity don't meet right and this exchange was created to sort of answer or put an end to that you need all the cast of characters to make that happen even though you have an exchange investors opportunities come to that exchange but there's nobody who has done the diligence for those opportunities there's no prospectors there are no advisors who the investors can rely on and small investors you know who want to in you know who are not going to write the entire check but want to do smaller sums they cannot the economies of scale aren't there for them to undertake their own due diligence they are not able to then those of them who do embark and make an investment there's no exit horizon it's difficult to monetize that exit to the gentleman's point in the back third there is no formal criteria in terms of okay what is impacting investing and what are you going to get what are the return thresholds from an impact standpoint which are not clearly defined so there are these three or four sort of key constraints that are preventing that exchange from flourishing and perhaps it's probably very early stages and Myanmar I think you'll see a lot more happening on a sort of bilateral basis before you you know you start getting into an exchange discussion as a journalist I'm a very cognizant of deadlines and we've been told to wrap this up at three o'clock so just very briefly I'd like to ask each of you just to give me an elevator pitch thirty seconds of what you've what you've learned what you would like your last message to be to this to this panel from me what I really inspired with this discussions especially the the eagerness for more private funds to invest and to address triple bottom line environment social economic so we need to promote more about this kind of impact investing to government to in to ASEAN countries to more private sectors so I believe all of the social issue will be solved within our lifetime so and it can be solved if everyone's collaborate and participate to solve this issue not just some kind of social activities but even business businessmen and businesswoman everyone can participate to address this triple bottom triple bottom line through impact investing so I'm optimistic about impact investing as a field to grow and I think there's again great examples out there that are starting to move the needle I think it is a continuum and so those coming into the field need to be really thoughtful about where they want to play on that continuum because it's about matching opportunity with their expectations and I would because I think precision matters so we need to do a lot more around being to evaluate the social return on investment we need to learn a lot more about these exits and so hopefully in particular in the next ten years we'll have some some more momentum and then I think there'll be even larger opportunities there for the field at large and just I would close I am optimistic about the opportunities here in Myanmar it's a fascinating country with just amazing people I think that there's a lot of opportunity in the greater Mekong area where we operate for social impact investment and I think the investment is not that high risk as some of the people might consider it's really sustainable the return is reasonable and slow risk and I think that's where investors should look into that sector I would just say keep it simple embody it and everything you do and always have robust measurement criteria with all of those and say I mean it's to say that it's a great time to be alive I mean we are at a point in history where we can look back and see that we've accomplished the phenomenal things over the past couple centuries and we actually created the systems that are causing a lot of the problems that we're talking about now whether they're poverty or climate change etc we are capable of creating the systems that address them in very short period of time and you know we're smart we're quit we spend a lot of time thinking about other things that are just silly and you know I think if we can also look to the next generation of younger people in our society and see that they're demanding more they are demanding more and I think that's exciting and that's promising overall so regardless of the industry of impact investing and how you know formal measurement or whether there's exits etc I think the business world is going to look extremely different and we will have the opportunity and we do now have the opportunity to change and to create the world we want to we want to live in there's some very practical ways to do that right now and we need to focus on the inequities as we grow I think all of you have done a good job of convincing a rather skeptical journalist that it is possible to make money and do social good especially when you look at it from a longer term perspective you know I'm from the old media business which I've been told is a dying field if anybody wants to invest in the print business let me know I think the social good of it may be offset sadly by the poultry economic returns but I want to thank everybody there is a fund that does that thank you