Since 2012, Better Society Capital has acted as the trusted bridge between social need, policy and investment opportunity. We work with expert partners to understand people’s needs first, then use our knowledge and capital to invest with fund managers who share our ambition to build a better, more sustainable future.
Across the UK, we focus on four priority areas - housing, economic opportunity, climate and energy, and health - where social need, scalable business models and long-term national priorities align. Our portfolio spans five asset classes: property, venture capital, social lending, renewables and social outcomes contracts.
Over more than a decade, we have developed a four-part framework for building impact investment markets - grounded in practice and refined through honest reflection on what has and has not worked.
Every investment thesis begins with a social problem, not a financial product
We look beyond capital alone to the policies, standards and capabilities that determine whether markets can sustain themselves
We back existing strength where it exists, and build where gaps remain
We deploy a broad range of investment and non-investment tools to match what each market needs
Our method plays out through three connected pillars of activity that run continuously across everything we do: developing the market itself, actively deploying capital into new opportunities, and staying closely engaged with the portfolio we've built. What we learn managing our portfolio shapes how we develop the market and source new investments – it is a continuous, repeating cycle.
Investment life cycle
As a wholesale social impact investor, BSC invests in funds. The fund managers, and the social purpose organisations they invest in, create the impact. Our role is to bring the most relevant experts from our networks to the table, generating ideas and connecting capital to where it’s most needed.
Every pound we deploy is designed to mobilise multiples more – contributing to our wider ambition to mobilise £20-30 billion into investible solutions and improve 15-20 million lives across the UK by 2035. Across all our investment activity, we have two core portfolio objectives:
To support our strategic goals and organisational mission to build an investment ecosystem that supports enterprises to improve people’s lives
To support our own financial sustainability through delivering our corporate-level net return target of 1% (after market-building costs and tax). This means we target a 3-5% annualised return on our portfolio
We seek to build a portfolio to deliver the greatest impact and systems change while living up to achieving our financial risk-return requirements. We do this through:
Prioritising which investments to make through our impact and systems change goals, including their ability to crowd in significant capital to scale impact and build the market
We then size investment allocations to deliver our overall financial goals and diversification of factor risks including liquidity.
Each investment we make contributes in its own way to the portfolio. To ensure we build a balanced portfolio, we invest across three types of investment with different risk-return characteristics:
Investing in emerging business models and fund managers to help build a track record that crowds in other capital.
Investing in more proven business models and fund managers to scale solutions.
Investing to ensure a consistent supply of capital to enterprises delivering impactful business models.
We aim to commit £60-80 million each year into new high potential proposals by actively managing our portfolio to meet our drawdown, repayment and financial return targets to ensure the availability of investment over the long term for impact and systems change.
Find out more about our investment process and requirements
