Announcement: Geneva Foundation for Future, Values and Trust for Impact investing ORAL PRESENTATION

Our multi-disciplinary team is involved in the development of companies and NGOs. In this context, it has observed a mismatch between interesting projects worthy of sponsorship funding and the requirements of public and private funding bodies. This is particularly true in terms of the presentation of projects, in order to apply for funding and - at the end of the reporting exercise - to meet their standards.

This mismatch leads to a lack of productive interaction between projects and funding agencies. If they were brought together, the available funds, which are not being met, and the serious projects, which are not being funded, would have a much greater potential for societal impact, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

We propose to make available user-friendly and efficient instruments within a Foundation called Fondation de Genève pour le Futur, which could at the same time provide the necessary services, consulting, training and coaching to the actors concerned in order to make all these interactions fluid.
Mrs Christa MUTH, co-founder, Geneva Foundation for the Future, Switzerland

European Investment Bank ORAL PRESENTATION

• Time for philanthropy, the role of the European Investment Bank (EIB)
• The EIB Institute Social Programme: Social Innovation, Social Incubation, Microfinance and Financial Literacy
• Impact investment, demand and supply mismatch
• How can Impact Investment become mainstream ?

Mr Francisco de Paula Coelho, Dean, European Investment Bank Institute, https://institute.eib.org/

Back to basics: Investing in Humanity for social change through the Performing Arts ORAL PRESENTATION

Opera for Peace, Leading Young Voices of the World, circular culture, integrating blockchain-based platform: talking about connection / discovery / performing arts / strategic meetings and partnerships for a new and more meaningful impactful giving

Mrs Julia LAGAHUZERE, Co-founder & General Director / Femme de Culture 2020, Opera for Peace

Impact Investing and Philanthropy: Two Concepts, One Ethics ORAL PRESENTATION - ABSENT

It is usual to present philanthropy as an initiative aiming at the public good, while impact investing is described as the promotion of private interests.

Yet, it is less and less easy to support such a Manichean distinction between a practice deemed altruistic and thus morally desirable, and one regarded as egoistic and consequently morally condemnable.
Is this distinction relevant? Are philanthropists more respectable than impact investors? Ethically speaking it appears that a polarized approach might be misleading.

Mr. Emmanuel R. Goffi, CEO, Global AI Ethics Institute, https://globalethics.ai/

Addressing long-term food challenges with technology ORAL PRESENTATION

How Ag and Food Tech investments can yield new growth and sustainability at scale

Mr Nadim EL KHAZEN, Investment Manager, Private Equity, Edmond de Rothschild, France and Switzerland

Post Pandemic: How Blockchains Will Transform Healthcare ORAL PRESENTATION

Healthcare needs an update. It does not take a pandemic to realize that. Healthcare is perfectly positioned to be the next area of blockchain adoption because it is highly fragmented, full of intermediaries, and suffers from a lack of transparency and inefficient processes. dHealth Network addresses these problems because it is not controlled by any single player, can be accessed directly by all stakeholders as a peer-to-peer network, and functions as a layer of trust.

dHealth’s proof-of-stake blockchain enables privacy-preserving interactions among healthcare stakeholders without the need to build separate data-processing infrastructures.

dHealth Network provides the world’s leading framework for health-to-earn to industry players to power their use cases.

Our current live real world solutions include: Incentivizing patients when they give permission to use their healthdata, Real World Evidence Symptom monitoring and GDPR compliant retargeting, Tracking vaccines in Subsaharan Africa, Health Certificates protect vulnerable populations during the pandemic, etc

Dr. Quy Vo-Reinhard, Co-Founder / Director, dHealth Foundation, Switzerland

Digitalization as a tool to promote Internationalization of E-Commerce SMEs in Africa ORAL PRESENTATION

As the world is experiencing innovations in modern information and communication technologies revolutionizing the business environment, the internet also provides challenges and opportunities to new and existing companies which conduct business in innovative ways with a growing share of international activities. This new form of the marketplace on the internet “digital sales channels” differs from the traditional market environment. Their value creation and delivery seem to attract and encourage SME’s from emerging economies to explore the model to its delivery. Taking a look at the United Nations Sustainable eighth goal which factors the promotion of inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all which has the support by the current President of Ghana’s initiative as the head of the African Union on “transforming an economy through digitalization”, the use of these digital sales channels has created an avenue for E-Commerce businesses to thrive. COVID-19 has disrupted billions of lives and endangered the global economy.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects a global recession as bad as or worse than in 2009. As job losses escalate, the International Labor Organization estimates that nearly half of the global workforce is at risk of losing their livelihoods. Even before the outbreak of COVID-19, one in five countries home to billions of people living in poverty were likely to see per capita incomes stagnate or decline in 2020. Therefore in the regard to help reduce the job losses and create job avenues and opportunities, this research is undertaken to create awareness and help provide a new perspective in the E-Commerce industry. The study will look at how does the adoption of digital sales channels enable E-Commerce SMEs in developing countries to internationalize and enter into foreign markets.

Mr Oduro NANA YAW NKANSAH, Geneva Business School, Switzerland

Combining Crowdlending with A Crypto-Currency to Increase the Efficacy of Economic Development ORAL PRESENTATION

The efficacy of socio-economic development programs that utilise fiat currencies to provide economic aid, both international and domestic, whether to emerging nations or in many cases even within donor countries, is often limited by political, cultural and structural factors. The advent of blockchain technology, combined with different classes of cryptocurrencies and payment tokenization offer a novel approach that can multiply the efficacy of economic development aid and programs several-fold. The presentation will describe how such a novel approach can offer unprecedented efficacious solutions, utilizing three examples: 1- The UK government’s recent decision to reduce international development assistance from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP; 2- The income gap between indigenous and non-indigenous populations: the case of Canada’s sovereign First Nations; 3- The catastrophic economic collapse of the Lebanese economy that was accelerated by the Beirut port explosion in August 2020, exacerbated by a crash of more than 90% in the value of the national fiat currency in a matter of months.

Mr. Rachad ITANI, President, and Mr. Alberto RAVAGNI, Phoenix Economic Developement Agency (PHOEDA)

The role of Reinsurance in The Economic Develpment of Emerging Countries ORAL PRESENTATION

<docNNNN|left> The reinsurance industry provides many important contributions to the economy : as insurer in last resort, it brings liquidity to primary insurers in case of disasters and insures their solvency ; it pools large risks coverage ; it brings capacity and reduces costs attached to large risks insurance ; it guarantees insurability of all risks and can promote innovation in coverage products. It so contributes to the development of primary insurance in emerging economies in Non-Life as well as Life Insurance. Therefore, it promotes economic efficiency, by substituting market financing to public budgetary resources, which then can be devoted to other more important uses in terms of development, such as Infrastructures, Education or Health financing.

Mrs Josephine Sandrine BILOA, Entreprise Financière et d’Assurance, Chad

Green GDP based on a micro-funded model ORAL PRESENTATION

Our paper creates the first Green GDP based on a micro-funded model. We develop a simple formula that subtracts from GDP the expected sum of future damages on production due to climate change, more precisely due to atmospheric carbon concentration. The adjustment value depends on how much people care for the future. Our work ahead is to do the same on companies’ valuations.

Mr Jeremy DYENS ; University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Planet Earth is a fixed-sum capital ORAL PRESENTATION

We have built a world running contrary to Nature for nearly 250 years, and now we can renovate it, rebuild it and continue an ethically committed construction, this time in symbiosis with our environment. That spells three times more opportunities that what has been done so far. In order to respond to the opportunities available to all humans, we must embark on an uncompromising transition to a sustainable economy. This movement requires responses to political, industrial, environmental and social challenges. To achieve this, such a shift requires changes in perception and mentality.(corriger si erreur d’anglais) ONE CREATION Cooperative is a company that offers an “instrument” dedicated to the investment community of all stakeholders in order to support the rapid development of environmental technologies through a multi-sector approach (listed and unlisted shares, early-stage and scale-up start-ups, green infrastructure and real estate). This "instrument" enables means of providing long term support for meeting the goals set by COP21, pre-serving associates’ capital and generating financial returns from a truly sustainable economy.

Olivier FERRARI, ConinCo, Switzerland

Sustainable finance in the digital age – Focus on impact investing in Switzerland ORAL PRESENTATION

The research began in 2018, a period marked for the banking industry by the development of two key topics: digitization and sustainable finance. During the past two years, it was impossible to open a financial newspaper without reading one or more articles on these two themes. The two subjects, always presented separately, seemed to experience their rapid evolution in parallel and to leave an indelible imprint on the banking industry around the world. Switzerland, a major financial center, is faced with the same problems with a differentiating element, the end of banking secrecy. The Swiss financial center must therefore reinvent itself and modify its business model, especially in Geneva, the center of private banking and asset management. The problematic of the thesis seeks to study the paradigm shift of the Swiss financial sector, and more particularly that of private bankers from the point of view of digitization and sustainable finance. Ignoring these two issues can end in death, while integrating them heralds a glorious future and perhaps the ambition to be the bank of tomorrow. But how is it possible to integrate these two very distinct approaches? Are there synergies and can one support the other?

Mrs Florence ANGLES, Capco, Switzerland

Making Finance Holistic: an ecosystem for Smart financing for building renovation ORAL PRESENTATION

Buildings are responsible for 40% of EU energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions. Because of new Green Deal measures, building renovation is required for these buildings because of their low energy efficiency as well as insufficient maintenance measures over the past decades. Renovation brings potentially large energy savings, making the arduous process actually profitable in the long-term. However, investment procurement remains difficult today because of the long refinancing periods, and lack of project pipeline despite the need because of unclear guidelines, diverse stakeholders and bureaucracy.
(https://fineergodom.eu/)

Mrs Charlotte Eloise STANCIOFF, Ekobureau, ESEB, Latvia, http://ekubirojs.lv/en/home-eseb/

Integrating Philanthropic models into Impact Investing for SDGs in Least Developed Countries (LDC’s) ORAL PRESENTATION

Taking an inventory of projects funded through philanthropic donations and impact investments in Least Developed Countries (LDC’s) across the world, one trend could be ascertained; projects with its roots from impact investment have a higher tendency to sustainability over a longer term than donation based projects in LDC communities. Although, not relegating the importance or relevance of philanthropists in actualizing the SDGs, a change in approach of philanthropic donations might be required going forward to ensure the long-term survival of projects built with donations, rather than as an impact investment.
On the one hand, donation-based projects particularly in communities of LDCs aim to make social impacts without any financial returns while on the other hand, impact investment while making the social and environmental impact, also has an expected financial return even if it is “below market rate”. Hence, impact investing in projects in achieving the SDG’s provides further capacity that encourages the benefactors (local communities) of the such projects to make productive and commercial use of it in order to payback, rather than see it as a “Gift”. The “Gift” mentality usually does a disservice to the long-term survival of such project due to the attitude of protecting and maintaining such social infrastructure. A typical example is a water project to provide clean drinking water in a community of typically farmers in a village in an LDC; a philanthropic donation would simply build a water infrastructure while an impact investor would go a step further by providing other irrigation facilities either for rent for them to make economic use, hence being able to payback the investment at affordable rate over time.
Coming from such society, I have a firsthand understanding of both scenarios and can imagine a redirection or integration of philanthropic models into impact investing to achieve the SDG’s particularly in LDCs.

Mr Akeem AMUSA ; CnergyFund, Germany, http://cnergyfund.com/

Navigating Family Philanthropy ORAL PRESENTATION

Despite the fact that there exists a long tradition in family philanthropy, the field is slowly transforming towards being more effective and impactful. How can you ensure that you have the impact you want? How do you involve your family and networks? How do you ensure your resources are well spent? How do you successfully navigate the world of giving? This session is for aspiring and established family philanthropists who are seeking out new ways to ensure that their giving is meaningful.

Mrs Malgorzata KURAK, IMD, Poland, https://www.imd.org/gfbc/family-business/

Rethinking the role of banks for Impact Investments and Sustainable Development ORAL PRESENTATION

Sustainable development is defined as being “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, yet is the current short-term focused and liability-ridden financial system really sustainable? Until now, impact investments, donations and philanthropy have solely been focusing on the downstream side of investments, financing ethical and responsible projects. However, it is now time for a change. It is also time to begin monitoring and influencing what is happening upstream in the current banking and monetary system.

Consider the following. Since January 2020, the balance sheet of major central banks has increased by at least 42% with the creation of more than 7 trillion USD – a state of affairs that has exacerbated financial instability and disconnected the financial industry from the society.

This, even though history has repeatedly shown that all fiat currencies have been inflated almost to the point of becoming worthless. This, even though several studies highlight how inflation increases poverty and wealth inequalities.

At Voima, we aim to offer a fairer and more sustainable alternative with Voima Account, a gold-based bank account. Voima Account has been designed so that it combines the ease and flexibility of the digital user experience with the advantages of physical gold ownership.

Now, what if you could contribute to sustainable development and poverty alleviation not only through carefully selecting your investments but also through carefully selecting the money used to finance them?

Mr Robin KIPFER, Voima Gold, Finland, https://www.voimagold.com/