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SFi September 2026 Newsletter
Hello Impact Community,
September was truly a whirlwind, in the best way. It was wonderful to reconnect with so many of you and to make new connections at Hong Kong Green Week and beyond. Now, with a moment to reflect on everything that happened, we're ready to leap into Q4 with high energy and optimism.
The month was knowledge-packed from start to finish: we kicked things off with the SFi Impact Access event, moved into a full slate of HK Green Week activities, and closed with our CEO, Katy Yung, representing us at the GSG Impact Global Leadership Meeting 2026 in Amsterdam.
Read on for the key takeaways from each, plus a look at the Recommendations for Hong Kong's First Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) and which of our ideas made it into government thinking.
Key Takeaways from HK Green Week
September's HK Green Week kept us busy on both sides of the stage. Across conversations spanning SME financing, blended finance, circular economy thinking and impact real estate, here's what we learnt about how capital, data and design intersect to unlock impact.
AI is dismantling the underwriting barrier that locked SMEs out of capital. At the Philanthropy for Better Cities Forum 2026, our CEO Katy Yung moderated a fireside chat with Charles Li, Founder and Chairman of Micro Connect Group and former CEO of HKEX, who argued that AI has cracked the data problem that once made financing small businesses uneconomical at scale, and that philanthropic first-loss capital can now crowd in far larger pools of private investment behind it. Congratulations to The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust and the Institute of Philanthropy for convening this milestone 10th-anniversary forum.
Blended finance's next challenge is infrastructure, not individual deals. At the "Blended Finance in Action: Scaling Climate Adaptation and Resilience" workshop we co-hosted with Convergence Blended Finance and the Hong Kong Green Finance Association (HKGFA), Sathish Dhanapal of responsAbility Investments and Chad Ovel of Mekong Capital unpacked real climate adaptation transactions. What stood out across the room was a shared appetite to go beyond individual transactions and start building the infrastructure such as policy, platforms and partnerships, that enable blended finance to scale in Hong Kong and across Asia Pacific.
Circularity is a system of relationships, not a materials equation. Co-hosted with Daniel Vaughan, this session brought Dr. Emma Fromberg and Professor Jonatan Pinkse of King's Business School's Centre for Sustainable Business to Hong Kong. We traded the conference room for a park to observe nature and rethink what it can teach us about circularity and resilience. The sharpest insight often comes from shifting the lens, not refining the spreadsheet.
"The safest investment tackles problems nobody else wants to touch", shared Jonathan Rose, founder of Jonathan Rose Companies, in a fireside co-hosted by SFi and RS Group and moderated by Ronie Mak of RS Group. Affordability emerged as a continuum rather than a fixed category, and trust – not financial engineering – as the true mechanism behind turning around distressed housing. Rose is also deliberately transferring leadership to non-family successors, believing the mission should outlast its founder.
The thread that held across every conversation was that real impact happens when capital gets creative about who it trusts and how it flows. Thank you to every partner and speaker who shaped these discussions, we look forward to carrying them forward.
Notes from GSG Impact's Global Leadership Meeting 2026
Our CEO Katy Yung joined the GSG Impact Global Leadership Meeting 2026 in Amsterdam, where nearly 50 National Partner chapters gathered under new Chair Nick Hurd. The strongest message from the discussions: the real constraint on impact capital isn't funding, it's unlocking institutional capital already sitting on the sidelines. Panellists cited harmonised MDB data showing private-sector lending in emerging markets defaults at just 3.9%, well below sovereign debt, suggesting EM risk is often overstated.
Founder Sir Ronald Cohen closed by tracing the movement's arc, from a USD 10 million European venture fund in 1981 to the USD 13 trillion impact capital market it helped seed today. His pick for the next tool to scale – outcomes-based financing, where governments pay for results, not activity. A USD 8 billion Education Outcomes Fund spanning eight countries, and the UK's new USD 1 billion outcomes fund for child development are the two proof points.
For Hong Kong, the meeting surfaced several actionable threads:
Two narratives worth testing: the systemic, policy-facing "impact economy" framing, and the more programmatic, fundable "outcomes-based financing" angle.
APAC markets to watch: Japan, Thailand and Australia are emerging as regional leaders in the impact economy space.
A proof-point playbook: the Netherlands' impact-allocation pledge started at 10% a decade ago, and some funds now target 15% – a track record that makes it easier to engage conservative institutional and family-office audiences without a values-led pitch.
A regional moment: with the UK's upcoming G20 presidency in 2027, and GSG's China National Partner a natural counterpart, this is a good time to think deliberately about how we build cross-chapter ties across APAC.
Our Recommendations for Hong Kong's First Five-Year Plan (2026–2030)
Earlier this year, SFi submitted a formal response to Hong Kong's First Five-Year Plan consultation, calling on government to actively mobilise impact capital as a core lever of economic strategy, rather than a peripheral concern. Our submission focused on three priorities:
Patient capital: embed impact scoring into HKIC's fund selection, open its pipeline to co-investors, and reserve Co-Investment Fund capital for smaller managers.
Social financing: launch an Impact Cross-Steering Platform and pilot outcomes-based financing for elderly care and preventive healthcare.
Nature and oceans: create a clear government entry point for nature-based proposals and a staged matching-funding scheme.
We're pleased to see early traction. The Five-Year Plan, announced in mid-September, formalises a tripartite model for poverty alleviation – government setting targets, business providing resources, community leading delivery, closely aligned with our recommendation. It's an encouraging indicator that our policy input is being translated into government commitments, and we'll continue tracking how implementation unfolds.
Rethinking the Clock on Climate Capital
What if the real barrier to climate finance isn't a shortage of bankable deals or scalable founders, but the clock capital runs on? Our latest SFi Impact Insights piece, "Capital on the Wrong Clock: Structuring Investment Design to Unlock Climate Impact," explores how patient capital from insurers and family offices, deployed through evergreen vehicles, warehouse facilities and blended first-loss tranches, may be the missing architecture to move climate solutions from pilot to institutional scale.
Read the full article to see how asset owners can rethink investment design for climate impact.
Our events are exclusive to SFi members unless stated otherwise. If you’re not yet part of our community and would like to join our events – along with gaining access to other member benefits – get in touch to learn more about becoming an SFi member.
Swiss impact manager responsAbility Investments announced the final close of its Asia Climate Fund at USD 461 million, its largest closed-end climate vehicle to date, targeting low-carbon solutions and emissions reductions across South and Southeast Asia.
GPS Renewables (GPSR), a Bengaluru-based renewable oil and gas company, has raised roughly USD 74 million in a Series C funding round to accelerate the development of compressed biogas (CBG) infrastructure.
Indonesian distributed solar developer Hijau raised USD 10 million from Singapore-based Clime Capital's South East Clean Energy Fund II in an early-stage funding round to scale clean-energy infrastructure across Indonesia.
Google-backed Indian space startup Pixxel, whose hyperspectral satellites capture detailed Earth-observation data used to track climate, agriculture and environmental change, raised USD 100 million in a Series C round led by Temasek and Seraphim, bringing its total funding to USD 195 million and marking the single-largest funding round by a space technology company in India.
The Asia Investor Group on Climate Change released its Hong Kong-specific climate transition report, finding that 33% of Hong Kong asset owners have committed to increasing climate solutions investments, up from zero the year before.
The Institute of Philanthropy, together with the Financial Services Development Council and Hong Kong Academy for Wealth Legacy, launched a new reportexamining how Hong Kong's financial and philanthropic infrastructure can be better mobilised to unlock impact capital.
The Commission on Asian Philanthropy, co-convened by the Institute of Philanthropy and the Asian Philanthropy Congress, released its Interim Report at PBC 2026, projecting that domestic philanthropic giving across Asia could exceed USD 1 trillion within the next decade, up from USD 109 billion in 2024.
Click the links below to register or find out more about upcoming events
** denotes events where SFi are speakers
6-8 October: Building Bridges (Geneva)
7 October: Creating Lasting Impact Through Philanthropy (Singapore)
16 October: 6th annual Taiwan Impact Investing Forum (TIIF 2026) (Taipei & Virtual)**
21 October: Indonesia Impact Investment Summit 2026 (Jakarta)
28 October: One Earth Summit (Hong Kong)
5 November: PWMA Wealth Management Summit 2026 (Hong Kong)
For members, please add events@sustainablefinance.hk to your contacts and kindly confirm your attendance via the calendar invitation for all SFi-related events.
We welcome Family Office Principals, Private Investors managing endowments or foundations, and NextGen Investors to connect with us and explore the benefits of joining the Sustainable Finance Initiative community. Become part of a network of like-minded changemakers driving impact across Asia Pacific and beyond – and gain access to member-only opportunities designed to support your sustainable investment journey.
