All posts by David Bank

Publish What You Fund
September 4, 2012 · 4 comments

A movement is afoot to liberate global-development investment data to provide not only accountability, but opportunity maps, market research and effectiveness indicators, providing new visibility into possibilities for collaboration and innovation. Though much of the current development data is public,...

Risk and Reward in Taking On Homelessness and Recidivism
August 2, 2012 · 1 comment

Shifting the risk for delivering measureable social progress from government to private investors is supposed to be one of the key features of “social impact bonds,” a promising new way to finance programs tackling nitty-gritty challenges such as homelessness and...

Sizing the Impact Investing Market
July 17, 2012 · No comments

A new crop of private equity investors are seeking — and measuring — social impact in their portfolios without lowering their expectations for financial returns. Such “double bottom line” investors fueled the growth of private equity impact funds, to a...

Transparent Deal Data for Impact Investors
June 22, 2012 · 1 comment

Everybody is in favor of open data, it seems, except when it comes to their own. So it is in impact investing, where many investors say limited information about financial results and social and environmental impacts is keeping significant capital...

Hedging with Impact Investments?
June 14, 2012 · 1 comment

I was intrigued by a line in the piece in the Financial Times by Alex Friedman, the chief investment officer at UBS and Patty Stonesifer, the former head of the Gates Foundation that urged investment managers and banks to step...

New details of $25 million JP Morgan-Gates-Rockefeller African farm fund
June 12, 2012 · 2 comments

The $25 million African Agricultural Capital Fund was billed as “first of its kind” when it was announced last year, but backers were a little hazy about exactly what it was the first of. A new case study of the...

$1.5 million for mobile app to boost African farm incomes
June 12, 2012 · No comments

Virtual City, a mobile-technology company based in Nairobi, is redesigning its agricultural supply-chain system to help small farmers raise their incomes, through $1.5 million in convertible debt financing from Acumen Fund. The deal, announced last week, is an example of...

Entrepreneurs in Africa 1 of XX
June 11, 2012 · No comments

The Kauffman Foundation is bullish on entrepreneurship in Africa and will push it at the African Innovation Summit at the end of the week: Governments in the region seem to be valuing bottom-up movements for entrepreneurship in their efforts to...

The Atlantic: How Financial Innovation Can Save The World
June 3, 2012 · No comments

Financial innovation got a bad rep in the financial crisis. But inside the well-barricaded Federal Reserve Bank in downtown San Francisco last month, the financial engineers were at it again. Teams of financial statistical whiz kids pitched complex new bonds,...