In Conversation with Adam Swersky (Social Finance) on How to Design, Fund and Scale Better Solutions to Challenging Social Problems
Written by Mansa Shroff
The conversation with Adam opened my eyes to multiple aspects of social finance of which I was previously unaware and taught me a lot, in just a brief conversation, about how different social challenges can shape and improve our approaches to investment and financing. These challenges are underfunded and are harder to address with the traditional financing model.
We spent the first portion of the evening discussing how the landscape of social finance has evolved since Adam started working in the field in 2014. In 2016, Adam created the world’s first social impact bond to support people with health issues at work. For those who don’t know, social impact bonds are an innovative financing mechanism in which governments or commissioners enter into agreements with social service providers, such as social enterprises. From a healthcare perspective, it was great to see how social finance and healthcare could converge.
There have been many changes in the field, given the shift of focus in the investment world to how we can best tackle some of the world’s most pressing social challenges. This presents us with several questions. For example, one important, and continually developing one, is about how we go about ‘measuring impact’ when it comes to these “social” challenges. In the world of investing and finance, impact measurement is an important feature of the landscape and one which can influence the successful creation and maintenance of projects. At the same time, the true value of an intervention’s impact on “social issues” can be a complex metric to ascertain. Some of the value may be intangible, difficult to quantify or even too intricate to trace. Work on this is being done, but it remains an open question – how do we incentivise and excite investors to become a part of social financing?
Given his experiences, Adam recommends that the leaders of tomorrow design financial models that effectively align incentives and encourage collaboration among stakeholders to address complex social challenges. This includes, for him, ensuring diversity in decision-making and supporting low-income entrepreneurs. He also recommends approaching the design of solutions to ensure they are equitable and accessible to all segments of the population, especially those that don’t have convenient access to funding, resources, or mentorship.
Partnerships and collaborations will play a big role in the design phase and can foster meaningful collaborations that enhance the impact of social solutions in an increasingly interconnected world. The engagement from the audience, which we turned to at the end of the evening, showed just how eager many are to ask the difficult questions. A variety of voices are ready to mull over how we maintain momentum and keep up the energy for tackling ‘wicked’ problems, without losing sight of the difference we can make to communities and people across the world. And, to continually bring us back to this, Adam recounted stories of the projects with which he has been personally involved and stories from which he draws considerable hope.
Overall, Adam provided a fresh and innovative perspective on social financing challenges and presented a good scope of the directions the industry should be moving. Moreover, his journey as a Cambridge alumni and Queen’s College member to a leading voice in social entrepreneurship is so inspiring. I am certain that everyone in the audience took something away from his reflections!
Speaker Bio: Adam Swersky is the CEO of Social Finance. Social Finance is a not-for-profit consultancy organisation that partners with governments, service providers, the voluntary sector and the financial community to find better ways of tackling social problems in the UK and globally. He was appointed as the CEO in March 2022 and has been with the organisation since 2014. In 2016, Adam created the world’s first social impact bond to support people with health issues at work and in 2019, he launched a national infrastructure support programme for mental health and employment services across the NHS in England. Adam was previously a Project Leader at The Boston Consulting Group, where he advised private, public and not-for-profit organisations on strategy and transformation.
Mansa Shroff
Mansa Shroff is an MBA student at Judge Business School and a graduate student at King’s College. She’s a microbiologist by training and has worked in the US at USDA, Harvard Global Health Institute, and MIT. She is now pursuing an MBA in healthcare and is interested in digital health entrepreneurship. Mansa has been a member of the E-Lab since 2023.