Webinars

As Social Impact Bonds and payment-by-results pilots develop, commissioners are increasingly asking us ‘how should I procure such a service?’. Compared to traditional procurement processes, choosing a Social Impact Bond provider can seem daunting. Assessing the price to be paid for an outcome may require new skills. Engaging social investors in a procurement process may be unfamiliar. The temptation could be to simply avoid establishing Social Impact Bonds.

We think that such a response would be a mistake. With support from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Social Finance has put together a technical guide for commissioners which will be discussed in this webinar. As we have set out in the guide, there are already a range of promising approaches being developed to the commissioning and procurement of Social Impact Bonds. Ben Jupp and Mark Graham from PricewaterhouseCoopers will run through the commissioning process and address key issues. The webinar will conclude with a Q&A session.

We recommend that you read the guide .

The Venture Capital Trust (VCT) is an existing tax incentive scheme in the UK that is designed to encourage individuals to invest directly in a range of small higher-risk trading companies whose shares and securities are not listed on a recognised stock exchange. During the fiscal year 2010-11, industry experts anticipate that the VCT industry as a whole will raise in the region of £400 million and this trend is expected to continue into 2011-12. The Social Impact Venture Capital Trust aims to make use of this tax incentive scheme to create a pool of readily available investment capital immediately deployable among socially driven companies in the UK. Annika Tverin and Diane Mak will talk through the concept of a Social Impact VCT, the investment thesis and some of the challenges in its development. The webinar will conclude with a Q&A session.

Social Finance is exploring how Social Impact Bonds could be used to improve patients’ health at the same time as reducing expenditure on health services.

In this webinar Ben Jupp and Eleanor Stringer will discuss the need for Social Impact Bonds in the health field, and suggest the ways social investment could be used to improve outcomes.

For example, there is a need for better services for patients with long-term conditions such as diabetes, to help them to manage their condition and receive treatment closer to home. If commissioners are willing to share some of the savings that would result from fewer patient hospital visits, could external investors be brought in to provide the upfront funding needed to achieve the outcomes?

Social Finance research, undertaken for the Financial Inclusion Taskforce, identified that many people in the UK are not currently benefiting from high street banking. We explored how a ‘Jam Jar Account’ that supports consumers to manage their money might work.

We concluded that a significant proportion would benefit from an account that:

• Allows customers to split their account balance into ‘Jam Jars’ for spending, saving and bill payment;
• Supports customers to improve their budgeting and bill payment behaviour through low balance alerts and automated sweeps between Jam Jars; and
• Gives customers access to trained ‘Money Managers’ that can provide budgeting advice and referrals to specialist consumer services where necessary.

In this webinar we explore our findings around the demand for a new approach to banking; whether Jam Jar Accounts already exist; and how their uptake could be increased.