The capital is here. What we need is a different mindset, and better plumbing.
Robert Rubinstein put it well in his Impact Mafia on the Road article: “It is not a pipeline problem. It is a plumbing problem.” He describes a small water project in Malawi that takes two years to raise, then hears “the ticket is too small.” I see versions of it across Asia: tickets too small, track records too thin, and due diligence that costs the same on a small cheque as a large one. (Hong Kong has its own challenges, including a small addressable market and reliance on grants, but that is for another essay.)
The money and the intent are here. A new report from the Institute of Philanthropy (IoP), Financial Services Development Council and the Hong Kong Academy for Wealth Legacy, Unlocking Impact Capital in Hong Kong, finds 70% of Hong Kong family offices polled want more flexible funding options.
The mindset
So what is missing? I think part of it is a mental block. It sits with the owners of the capital, whether institutions, families or individuals, because they decide what the mandate rewards. Venture capital works because a few outsized winners pay for the many bets that lose money or return little. In my experience, impact deals are often held to those same venture capital rules, with impact added on top.
The data points the same way. In the The Global Impact Investing Network’s State of the Market 2025 report, 89% of impact assets under management targeted market-rate returns. 9% targeted near-market returns. Only 2% went to below-market investments focused on capital preservation. For impact founders, it can sound like “we love what you do, let us know when you are profitable.”
Part of this is structural. In a 2025 study in the Journal of Business Ethics, Christian Garmann Johnsen and Johannes Lenhard interviewed impact venture capitalists. The investors were committed to both financial returns and impact, but, like other fund managers, they were bound by a fiduciary duty to maximize returns for their limited partners. Many said they were judged mainly on returns, and that impact should never come at their expense. Fund managers can only go as far as their mandates allow. So the mindset that has to shift sits one level up, with the owners of the capital.
That shift starts with how people who own the capital see impact investing. Mobilizing commercial capital is one legitimate goal. But when J.P. Morgan and the Rockefeller Foundation positioned impact investing as a new asset class in 2010, they described a varied field of investors, from individuals to institutions, seeking both returns and impact. Those investors never shared one return target. If impact capital is judged only by the market-rate returns mainstream investors expect, we lose what made it distinct. Impact investing should do both: crowd in commercial capital, and stand as its own asset class, with mandates and yardsticks set by the people who own the capital.
The plumbing
If owners change the mandate, three pieces of plumbing make it work. Demand for patient, catalytic capital is rising just as foreign aid declines, which makes them more urgent.
- Shared structures. Much of this work happens in silos, one transaction at a time, and new entrants keep working through the same questions on mandate, governance, risk, structuring and deployment. Ready-made structures would let owners set an impact mandate without starting from scratch. In the IoP report, 75% said structures and platforms they could plug into would be a key enabler of impact capital deployment.
- Bolder bets. Venture capital accepts that most bets will fail, because a few can return 10x or 100x. Impact capital rarely makes that trade, and with 89% of impact assets targeting market-rate returns, it is not hard to see why. What if owners carved out a pool, explicitly, for enterprises that could deliver 10x or 100x the impact per dollar, and accepted that some will not make it?
- Regional scale. One interviewee in the IoP report notes that impact capital has to benefit Hong Kong’s community, but the local market is too small to sustain it alone. The answer is intermediary support at scale, with Hong Kong as a base for the region.
What we are doing about it
At Asia Futures, we host small gatherings that let next-gen leaders meet founders and peers before they commit capital. That discovery stage — part of a discovery, trust and commitment model — is the plumbing we are building across Hong Kong, China and ASEAN. The aim is a learning pathway: on-ramps across the spectrum, from nonprofits to ventures to innovative finance, so people can get close to the work before they commit their time, networks, or capital.
The next generation may be where this moves first. Families and individuals with a direct say over their capital are not bound by a fund manager’s duty to LPs, so they can set a different mandate. Next-gen leaders are often more open to experimenting.
To family offices, next-gen leaders and impact investors: what is the single biggest bottleneck stopping capital from moving into impact deals? And what have you tried that worked?
Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse (7 Oct 2026).