The Systemic Investing Summit 2025: key takeaways

In March 2025 over 180 people gathered in London for the second Systemic Investing Summit. Here are the key themes that emerged...

By Hannah Paterson

#1 The urgent imperative

The urgency is undeniable. "We're preserving assets, not life…. We stand at a crossroads—one of mutually assured thriving or mutually assured destruction” (Indy Johar). At the Summit, there was a clear conviction: systemic approaches to investing are no longer theoretical ideals but practical necessities in the face of multiple unfolding crises.

#2 How do we move money at the scale we need?

The key lies in addressing the fundamental financial mechanisms. We must design, test, and refine new financing arrangements and vehicles and build the financial architecture necessary to enable the investment of capital, time, and effort. By showcasing successful models, we can create beacons of possibility, offering insights and inspiration to those navigating similar challenges in their own domains.

This requires a deep dive into financial products and orchestration across diverse contexts, systems, and geographies to mobilize the capital required. We must rethink risk, regulations, and return expectations—adapting and flexing them across different environments to drive systemic transformation.

How can we leverage combinatorial effects and financial backbones to bridge gaps, navigate constraints, and work through, with, and around the barriers we face?

#3 Naming power and the inner work of transformation

Our current systems have been built, shaped, and sustained by power in many forms. Naming, understanding, and challenging historical power imbalances is essential to true systems transformation.

This work demands deep reflection, inner shifts, and a willingness to rethink how we engage. It calls us to challenge traditional decision-making, foster meaningful collaborations, redefine risk, embrace systems thinking, stay the course and navigate the messy, uncertain terrain of transformation with courage and clarity.

This isn’t just inner work for personal growth—it’s a necessary step in redressing entrenched power structures and reshaping some of our most deeply embedded systems.

#4 Centering relationships

Building trust, collaborations, and partnerships must be driven by a clear purpose—creating transformative change.

This work is not easy. It demands agility, comfort with ambiguity, a willingness to challenge the status quo, and a commitment to testing, iterating, and continuous self-reflection. It cannot be done alone. Community, trusted colleagues, and strong relationships are essential for sustaining the long-term effort required for transformational change.

We must balance head and heart—aligning relationships, trust, and mindset shifts with the rigor of deep practice and content mastery. Using one to support the other, calling in support and challenge from our networks regularly to ensure we are stretching our practice in a way the moment we find ourselves in requires.

#5 The field is growing

The sheer demand to attend the Summit speaks for itself, with over 75 people on a waitlist. This signals a surge in interest in systemic investing. We also noticed a change in the way people showed up—last year it felt like individuals ‘coming together’; this year it felt more like a cohesive 'field’ of actors. However, we must consider how we scale something that is both complicated and complex.

With growth comes challenges:

  • A vast range of interpretations—how do we enable clarity and coherence?
  • A broad church with many perspectives—how do we uphold the rigor needed to do this work well?
  • Tension between the ‘purists’ and ‘pragmatists’ as the field expands; how do we balance and possibly hold this pluralism through our field-building efforts?
  • Expanding access—how do we welcome newcomers without diluting the depth and quality of the work?
  • A coordination problem—how do we ensure practitioners can learn and act together?
  • How we show up as systems change actors in turbulent times? How do we balance urgency with thoughtful, deep interventions?

Yet, this growth presents a tremendous opportunity: the opportunity to build a better world by mobilizing capital at pace and scale. To do so, we must be intentional about our strategies, thoughtfully designing ways to onboard wealth holders who have never considered the impact of their investments. This requires deep collaboration with a diverse set of partners and co-conspirators, striking the right balance between reach and rigor to ensure this movement is more than just the next empty buzzword.

 

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