True democracy means the greatest good for the greatest number with fair access to all.  No one would claim that global finance today is democratic.   In reality, markets are networks that tend towards concentration, to an extent never seen before.   Google has 4.3 billion users, accounting for over 90% of internet users, with a market value of $1.7 trillion. Facebook (now Meta) has 2.9 billion users and a market value of $590 billion.  The top 30 banks accounted for 62% of total assets of top 100 banks of $110.3 trillion at end of 2021.  The top 2 exchanges (NYSE and Nasdaq) account for 43% of total market cap of the top 30 global exchanges ($121.4 trillion).  In half of the world’s listed companies, the top three shareholders hold more than 50% of the capital.  The impacts on people are clear:  Credit Suisse reports that 2.9 billion people have less than USD10,000 in household wealth while the top 1.1% of the world’s population holds 45.8% of global household wealth. 

Who said life was fair?

The reality is that financial inclusion is an outcome that financial markets as they are currently structured, can only dream about.  Whether you are one of roughly 2 billion people who are unbanked or one of the 131 million small enterprises on the wrong side of the world’s $5 trillion MSME finance gap, you are likely to pay more for financial  services or simply do without, affecting your ability to grow or take on new opportunities.  And since SMEs drive job creation and emissions reduction in many economies, that affects growth, wealth and our ability to achieve net zero, on a massive scale.  

Even the World Federation of Exchanges recognizes that SMEs’ access to public markets are key to future inclusivity.  There are only 59,400 companies listed on the world’s exchanges, but over 400 million SMEs worldwide (according to the World Bank) who have a variety of financing needs that aren’t currently met by the financial markets or big banks.  

Could crowdfunding help?  

Crowdfunding is not new. Kickstarter has funded over 218,000 projects for startups totaling US$6.5 billion from 21 million funders since 2009.  GofundMe is one year younger, having raised US$13 billion in charitable donations for impact investing.  They are largely open access—anyone can list a project and anyone can fund.  In theory the platforms could scale up rapidly if market demand is really there, but there are still barriers to scale. 

But this is only one type of crowdfunding.  Crowdfunding could also be used by businesses looking for equity from investors in exchange for future profits or in peer-to-peer (P2P) lending schemes, whereby lenders are willing to get higher interest in taking stakes in unsecured loans for borrowers. 

In each of these instances, investors bear risks that are largely similar to public fund-raising– fraud, compliance, delivery and operations. Public equity exchanges manage these risks through a rigorous IPO (initial public offering) process with additional support from regulations, costs, and disclosure.   In other words, the exchange or regulator picks who is eligible for listing and under what conditions, and then the candidate has to be filtered by a gamut of reputable intermediaries (such as sponsors, accountants, lawyers).   With these limits in place to control access, plus technology to drive efficiency, the process is highly profitable for all concerned, even if it shuts out all but the largest and most well connected companies.   

This exclusivity has consequences not only for companies seeking funding, but for investors as well, particularly as interest in investing in companies with good ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) credentials rise to unprecedented levels.   

A Gallup poll in November 2021 of several thousand American investors found that over 48% of them are very interested or somewhat interested in investing in sustainable companies, although only 10% do so.  And 63% would invest in stocks of funds that reflect their values, indicating the rise of purpose-based investing. 

Can this interest be met by public markets?   As long as public markets are biased towards the large and well funded, it is difficult to believe the answer is yes. Green bonds can be an answer, but currently these are only really options for larger institutional buyers.  It is even more difficult to understand whether one’s investment – via stocks or bonds—will lead to more pro-ESG behavior by the company concerned.   

With large public equity markets and the asset management industry on the one hand, and tiny crowdfunding and P2P funding networks on the other, the choices for investors looking to make visible impact appear slim.  This has given birth to the field of impact investing, where networks have sprung up to share knowledge of projects and deals, tactics for due diligence, and ways to gauge impact.   They attempt to build trust and transparency through the age-old methods of conversation, networking and reputation. It works and is rewarding for all concerned, but it remains slow, localized and time consuming.   

We believe that digital platforms backed by blockchain, can vastly improve choices available to retail and small institutional investors when it comes to investing for ESG.  The idea is to enable projects and companies to self-signal using blockchain verified data, disclosures, and credentials, with open data so that the general public can actually “police”, together with new types of performance auditors, such as verification of carbon credits and delivery performance, to ensure that scam and fraud risks are minimized.   Payouts and dividends could easily be routed through the many two-way payment exchanges.  

An open platform that grants access to projects and companies for the ESG economy, using standardized and verified credentialing and disclosures, would provide transparency into the market for ESG causes.  In essence, this broadens the access base to a wider net of ESG projects to a wider net of investors, functioning the same way as existing stock exchanges, but with much lower entry barriers and more transparency. 

The technology for democratizing access to finance is already here.  What is lacking is the political will to cut through the vested interests to really democratize investing and funding for causes that really matter. Watch this space for more concrete ideas on how this can be done.  

https://www.oecd.org/industry/C-MIN-2017-8-EN.pdf

Contributed by

Andrew Sheng and Pamela Mar