Rise Of The Facilitators: Big Society Capital

Last night, at a ResPublica event, I heard Nick O'Donohoe, CEO of Big Society Capital, outline a pragmatic vision for a social investment market in the UK. Critically, BSC's role is not to hand out £600m in cash to well-intentioned social entrepreneurs. Instead, it's focused on creating the capability for deprived communities to identify, manage and finance projects that will have a mainly social impact, but with the expectation of some financial return. 

Let's say you want to introduce 'makerspaces' for local people with expertise in operating machinery to invent stuff and make individual items to order. It seems reasonable to believe this could help regenerate some industrial towns. Consider the adventures of Chris Anderson, who recently announced his departure as editor of Wired to run a drone manufacturing business he built as a hobby, as described in his latest book. 

How would you make it happen? How would you establish the feasibility of such a project, identify the right equipment, locate an appropriate building, obtain any necessary planning permission and so on? 

This takes time and expertise, not to mention seed money. Numerous intermediaries must be available to help entrepreneurs co-ordinate and finance their project locally. It can't be done by Big Society Capital from its offices in Fleet Street. It can't be done by civil servants from Westminster, or even by the local council. This has to be a distributed effort all around the country, leveraging online resources where that makes sense. Such intermediaries - or facilitators - will include social banks, active social investors, professional and other support businesses, as well as platforms that enable funds to flow directly from people with cash to social entrepreneurs. The role of Big Society Capital is to invest in the development of a strong network of these social investment intermediaries.

But maybe we shouldn't be too definitive about what is 'social'. I think this approach will be truly successful when facilitators and entrepreneurs aren't necessarily conscious of the fact that the positive social impact of their activities is far greater than the scale of their financial results. To this end, we should factor into all our corporate and project objectives an obligation to take responsibility for somehow improving the community to which the corporation or project relates. In this way, all businesses would have an overlapping social purpose as well as a financial one. 

Similarly, financial services need to support this broader responsibility. Of course it's critical that investors know exactly whether they are donating money, receiving interest payments or getting a share in a company. But if I'm putting £20 directly into any project, my customer experience shouldn't be different depending on whether I'm offered a ticket to a concert, interest at 3% per annum or 2 shares in the project operating company - in fact the same project should be able to offer me all three, seamlessly. That's the sentiment behind efforts to proportionately regulate peer-to-peer finance. All types of enterprise should be able to offer all kinds of instruments over a proportionately regulated digital platform, within an ISA.

Now that would generate some serious big society capital.

Sweat The Small Stuff

I enjoyed a great conversation with the Renegade Economist on Thursday. On the humorous side, it reminded me that:

"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall, there was this one: "Matters of great concern should be treated lightly." Master Ittei commented, "Matters of small concern should be treated seriously." Ghost Dog (previously cited here).

But, seriously, it's stunning how little of the detail is really understood by our institutions. Instead, they are obsessed with erecting grand schemes that are shaped most by surprise events beyond our control - 'black swans'. These grand schemes, like the 'single market' and the Euro, are brittle political constructs that neither minimise our exposure to the downside of surprise events nor maximise our exposure to the upside. Worse, they distract us from coping with structures that emerge organically outside the artificial regulated sphere as well as day-to-day outcomes that we might otherwise have avoided within it. It was typically five years too late before any financial regulator demonstrated any understanding of the shadow banking system lurking outside the walls, for example. And our regulated financial system has suffered from within due to poor due diligence on sub-prime debt, lack of scepticism amongst auditors, analysts who rarely say 'sell', banks who are fined millions for lax controls, and tax incentives that concentrate investors' risk and fail to deliver finance to creditworthy people and businesses.

Retail is detail, they say, but so is everything else. We need to align our tax and regulatory system with our actual or desired end-to-end activities, bottom-up, rather than with artificial, paternalistic institutional visions for the future.


Image from Core77.

Are ISAs "Safe"?

I'm having lots of discussions with mainstream policy folk at the moment, and it's striking that they perceive money invested via tax-free Individual Savings Accounts as somehow 'safe'.

This is somewhat true, up to the limits of compensation scheme protection. But only if you ignore the enormous direct and indirect costs of the bailouts required to deliver that protection, not to mention the fact that ISA cash earns 0.41% interest after 'teaser rates' expire, and investment returns after management and dealing fees may be slight (as we've learned in the pensions market). 

Even worse, your ISA money can't be properly diversified because you can only invest it in a limited range of regulated asset classes. So the government is both incentivising you to invest narrowly, and disincentivising you from putting your eggs in the full range of potential baskets.

But worst of all, like much of the money in the regulated system, the £350bn in total ISA money is 'dead' - propping up bank balance sheets and generating mutual fund fees - rather than working capital in the hands of creditworthy people and businesses who need it.

So it's high time that policy makers re-aligned the ISA tax incentives with the day-to-day activities of people and businesses. We urgently need to expand the range of asset classes within the ISA scheme, using proportionate regulation where appropriate.

Image from the Building Societies Association.

You're On Your Own: Pay Less, Diversify More, Be Contrarian

Heeding John Kay's timely warning, I've been paying a lot more attention to what's happening to my meager store of pension and ISA money and how much is being left in the hands of so-called "managers" who merely track an Index and their peers.

News on that front is getting worse. According to the FT, fund managers are finding it tougher to gain distribution through European retail banks, who are the dominant sales channel in continental Europe. The banks are cutting the number of fund managers whose products they distribute, and the fund managers are "scrambling" to be included. "Some fund managers are likely to have to pay higher charges to distributors...," the head of UK sales at JPMorgan Asset Management is quoted as saying. And the head of international retail business at BlackRock says, "Investors feel let down by what has happened in the financial sector as the industry has been focusing more on its own needs than those of clients."

In the same article, Lipper estimates that UK retail banks only distribute about 4% of investment products sold in the UK, and IFA-advised sales remain dominant at about 53%. But we all know that IFAs get a decent whack for the service they provide, so we're probably only seeing European banks playing catch up.

This news again signals the need to get more active, and use discount and execution-only providers to invest in cheaper products like Exchange Traded Funds. Doing the opposite of what the mainstream investment advertising suggests is also worth a shot, according to Mr Kay. This is not easy in the context of a full-time job and family commitments. While I've previously used a discount investment broker and began a stakeholder-friendly pension, only recently have I woken up to the "DIY ISA" and a low cost Self-invested personal pension (SIPP) that allows me to get off piste. But that's where I need to go. Next stop: ETF's in out-of-favour, non-correlated sectors.

I feel like this guy: