Building the sector

Advocacy of good ideas

Since its launch, GEXSI has worked hard at promoting innovative concepts that help to build an impact investment sector. A key focus has been concentrated on ideas that help to facilitate access-to-capital for organisations that are not or not yet mature enough for commercial impact investments at market-rate conditions.  These initiatives include:

• Round-it-up: We believe in the concept of inviting customers to round up their bills to the next 10 pence or cents. We have advocated this concept in many countries around the globe, and found many supporters including the Open Society Institute and the Heinrich-Boell-Stiftung. We are proud that with the German scheme, “Deutschland rundet auf”, a powerful idea now has reached its implementation stage in a major European country, with more initiatives to follow.
• Social Stock Exchange: It was our original aim to develop GEXSI into a platform for social investments. We specialised in the segment of philanthropic and hybrid impact investments that offer outstanding social impacts at below-market rate financial returns. In this context, we advocated the concept of CSR partnerships with leading stock exchanges to provide institutional support to host platforms for philanthropic giving, benefiting from high standards of due diligence and a sound entrepreneurial spirit.
• FundFinder: We strongly believe that the impact investment sector needs a user-friendly internet database that makes the “impact first” investment sector transparent and accessible. While great initiatives such as the Global Impact Investment Network have been launched in the past 2-3 years, there is still little information available for foundations and venture philanthropists that could help to fill the “missing middle” or “early stage social venture capital” gap. We strive to build a consortium of partners to build such a platform.

Whenever possible, we make use of such schemes for our own organizational purposes. The online fundraising platform, “impact-travel.org”, which we are currently in the process of building, follows the rationale of smart giving, just like the round-it-up idea.