Snowball CEO Daniela Barone Soares was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the King’s Birthday Honours, for using her platform to advocate for “seeing finance in service of people and planet”.
Barone Soares (pictured left) was awarded her OBE for creating investable products from the theories of impact investing, and now looks to create more broad access to the market. She has been a CEO and board member for over 15 years with focus in the impact investing space.
“Finance is the organising algorithm of the economy. It determines what is funded, what is not, what grows, and what doesn’t. This means it creates many of the problems around us: the big gap between rich and poor, rising emissions, and damage to nature. It is rational for us as fiduciaries and risk managers to think about the social and environmental impacts of the allocation decisions we’re taking,” Barone Soares said.
“This is about flipping our approach from seeing people and the planet as inputs in service of financial returns, to seeing finance in service of people and planet.”
With roots in private equity, Barone Soares was named CEO of Impetus in 2006, a position she held for the next nine years while funding the UK’s first ‘social impact bonds’ and using venture capital models for social enterprises and charity. She became CEO of Snowball, an investment fund focused on impact-driven investing across social and environmental impact, in 2019.
Barone Soares was also on the G7 National Advisory Board, and part of the advisory team which led to Better Society Capital.
She has now set sights on creating more access to impact investing as well as the quality of products available, and emphasised the importance of looking forward with investments.
“I see the healthy returns and the deeper impact you can get in private markets. But hardly anyone can access this. I’m more determined than ever to open that up to all investors – and quickly, so we can put more money into solutions for a better world,” Barone Soares said.
“Most investors still make investment decisions by looking at the past and extrapolating those results into the future. We think we are at an inflection point where this will no longer hold – the practices of the past may have produced what looked like growth and value, but they ignored too many of the longer-term consequences – and those consequences are increasingly coming home to roost.”
Big Issue Invest CEO
Meanwhile, Danyal Sattar, chief executive of Big Issue Invest, was also recognised as an OBE in this year’s Birthday Honours.
Sattar (pictured right) is a social investor with over 30 years’ industry experience and has dedicated his career to supporting social enterprises and charities to find solutions to poverty and inequality in the UK.
Prior to being made chief executive of Big Issue Invest in 2018, he was head of social investment at Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Here, he was responsible for managing the foundation’s social investment fund. He has also worked for Big Society Capital, Access Foundation for Social Investment and Esmee Fairbairn Foundation.
John Bird, founder of the Big Issue and crossbench peer in the House of Lords, said: “Bravo Danyal on your OBE. I’m pleased that his 30 years of service to social investing has been recognised with this prestigious honour.
“As the tireless leader of Big Issue Invest since 2018, Danyal has helped hundreds of businesses and charities across the country make their entrepreneurial visions a reality. Long may his passion for social investment continue to burn brightly.”
The first part of this article initially appeared on PA Future’s sister site Portfolio Adviser.
