What is systemic investing?

Systemic investing is the application of systems thinking to the practice of investing—in pursuit of social justice and a healthy planet. It is moving beyond single-point solutions to the coordinated deployment of multiple types of money in collaboration with other stakeholders. We sometimes describe it as a “1+1=3” approach to funding and investing, where the sum of the portfolio is greater than its parts. Systemic investing portfolios can include market-rate investment, concessionary capital, philanthropic grants, balance sheet investments, public procurement, subsidies and venture capital alongside interventions by other actors such as community groups, policy makers, NGOs, and researchers. It is a growing field, increasingly seen as the next evolution of traditional purpose-driven and impact finance.

  • White Paper

    White Paper

    This White Paper was published in 2020 and was a collective effort developed with a community of visionary innovators, finance professionals, scientists, entrepreneurs, systems thinkers, and creative minds. It was our seminal piece of thinking on systemic investing and became the foundation upon which TCI was built.

    Download Executive Summary Download Full Version
  • Hallmarks

    Hallmarks

    This document defines and describes what we mean by systemic investing and what it could look like in practice. It is the result of extensive conceptual work—the thinking through by the TCI team as well as countless conversations and interactions with pioneers in the “systems + investing” ecosystem. The hallmarks update and replace our earlier “key concepts” work. The document is currently under consultation with our community.

    Download the Hallmarks
  • Financial Backbones

    Financial Backbones

    Financial backbones are an emerging piece of financial infrastructure that strategically mobilize, coordinate, and deploy financial capital to transform systems. They fill a gap between generic systems orchestration and purpose-driven capital deployment. This report was co-written with 28 experts from across the capital spectrum, and offers a collective blueprint for further exploration and real-world experimentation.

    Download Financial Backbones
  • Builders Vision's Oceans Strategy

    Builders Vision's Oceans Strategy

    We deep dive into Builders Vision (BV) and their visionary oceans work. BV is an impact platform pioneering how to invest for transformative impact.

    Download
  • GroundBreak Coalition

    GroundBreak Coalition

    GroundBreak is a systems change initiative that is both participatory and grounded in place, working to close the wealth gap in Minneapolis–St. Paul, U.S.

    Download
  • US Food Waste Challenge

    US Food Waste Challenge

    Authored by Jason Jay and Alban Yau, TCI sponsored this case study charting the Fink family and ReFED’s systemic investing journey tackling US food waste.

    Download
Media type
  • Article
  • Book
  • Paper
  • Podcast
  • project
  • Report
  • Video
Topic
  • Community Activation
  • community building
  • Complexity
  • Economics
  • Finance
  • Management
  • Natural Science
  • Policy
  • Society
  • Sustainability Transitions
  • Systems Thinking
Workstream
  • Enabling
  • Field Building
  • Innovation
  • Prototyping
  • Research

Do you want to collaborate with us?

There is an urgent need to rethink the way we deploy financial capital for transformative impact in human and natural systems. The field of systemic investing has garnered significant momentum, and now is the time to scale deep and scale out. So we invite challenge owners, systems thinkers, innovation practitioners, investment professionals, ecosystem shapers, and creative voices to join us in figuring out how to redeploy financial capital in service of a prosperous and sustainable future for all.

How is systemic investing relevant to

Foundations

...because the pots of capital operating under a philanthropic logic are orders of magnitude smaller than those operating under an investment logic, so systemic investing is a way for foundations to leverage their capital in the systems they care about.

Corporations

...because their supply chains are becoming increasingly fragile and societal expectations of business are growing. This requires companies to deploy all the tools in their finance toolbox (incl. direct investments, advanced purchase agreements, and supply-chain financing) and partner more strategically with governments, foundations, and NGOs.

Impact Investors

...because single technologies, start-ups, or social enterprises—no matter how ingenious their solutions and how brilliant their teams—are unlikely to change systems by themselves. So what matters is that these single-point solutions are synergistically nested within a broader systems change effort.

Institutional Investors

...because mainstream ESG investing doesn’t benefit places and communities at the pace, scale, and quality required, so institutional investors must channel more capital into real-economy assets in a strategic and collaborative manner.

MDBs and DFIs

...because sustainable development in a VUCA world requires portfolio approaches to systems innovation, and those need to be funded with a different investment paradigm than those dominant in development finance institutions today. And because the public sector cannot finance sustainability transitions alone, so systemic investing is a way to crowd-in private-sector capital in a smart way.

Engage with us

Which option best describes your interest in systemic investing?

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About

Who We Are

The TransCap Initiative is a think-and-do-tank operating at the nexus of real-economy systems change, sustainability, and finance. We operate as a multi-stakeholder alliance coordinated by a backbone team and comprised of wealth owners, innovation leaders, system thinkers, research institutes, and financial intermediaries. Our community is open to anyone committed to our cause and values.

Why We Exist

We exist to improve the way sustainable finance is purposed, designed, and managed so that money can become a transformative force in building a low-carbon, climate-resilient, just, and inclusive society. We believe that the key to accomplishing this vision is to inspire and enable investors to leverage the insights and tools of systems thinking and complex systems science for addressing the most pressing societal challenges of the 21st century.

What We Do

Our mission is to build the field of systemic investing. This means developing, testing, and scaling an investment logic at the intersection of systems thinking and finance. We do that by convening a multi-stakeholder alliance to develop a knowledge and innovation base, test novel concepts and approaches, and build a community of practice.

Our core ideas borrow from the disciplines of systems thinking and complex systems science, challenge-led innovation, human-centred design, new economic frameworks, and financial innovation. Our experiments are contextualised in those place-based systems that matter most for human prosperity—such as cities, landscapes, and coastal zones—as well as in value chains and other real-economy systems. We hope that our work produces knowledge and insights, methods and tools, and a self-organising community of inspired and enabled change makers.

The places and value chains we intend to transform act as centres of gravity for our work. In each of these systems, we will work with challenge owners, communities, innovators, investors, and other stakeholders to design, structure, and finance strategic investment portfolios nested within a broader systems intervention approach.

Learn More

Contact Us

TransCap Core Team
community@transformation.capital