Earlier this month, over 1400 people gathered in San Francisco as the 4th annual Social Capital Markets Conference (SOCAP) bought together a crowd from all over the world – a crowd that despite its diversity had one thing in common: a passion and mission to better our world.

SOCAP is a globally renowned conference that aims to understand and maximize the interaction between money and meaning to create and deliver high impact results. The objectives of this year’s conference were two fold.

The first was to navigate, better understand and indeed bring together social capital market actors by providing examples, sharing knowledge and discussing systemic roadmaps of how to apply mechanisms to build the value proposition of the sector.

The second was on how to support and scale start-ups with seed funding, access and visibility.  SOCAP gave 80 scholarships to early stage, high-potential, investment ready social enterprise start ups – each of which have innovative and game-changing models to poverty alleviation and which come out of the start-up incubator programs run by organisations such as Unreasonable Institute, Echoing Green, or Slow Money.

A few examples of these inspiring entrepreneurs included Gaurav Manchanda’s One Degree Solar in Liberia, Cynthia Koenig’s Wello in India, Viera Funjika’s Zambikes in Zambia and Saba Gul’s Bags for Bliss in Pakistan.  They are well worth looking at and we hope you will find them on a Nexii platform soon!

A couple of other highlights also revealed at SOCAP worth looking at include:

Antony Bugg-Levine and Jed Emerson, two leading pioneers in the impact investing sector released their book, “Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money While Making a Difference”. The book has gained global attention and provides practical guidance in the impact investing sector by describing the history of the sector and exploring the potential for impact investing to be a powerful and disruptive force to better our world.  Read a review of the book by Nexii advisory board member Lucy Bernholz here.

SOCAP11 and MIT’s innovations have partnered and released a special quarterly impact investing journal that is available as a kindle book and emphasises that “the proof is in the doing!”  With more than 25 expert authors, the journal features cases authored by exceptional innovators; commentary and research from leading” academics and essays from globally recognised executives and political leaders”

There is so much more to say about SoCap11 and it is worth checking out their blog to read it.  Also worth reaching is this great article written by SoCap founder Kevin Jones on the transforming landscape of social capital markets.

SOCAP has once again brought together a powerful community of individuals questioning the world’s existing markets model, redefining how we measure profits and working to harness the power of the capital markets for good.  In the words of SOCAP founder Kevin Jones, “The market at the intersection of money and meaning is not a force of nature. It is a tool. Our tool. And it’s powerful. Let’s use it…..Let’s get things done.

Nexii and SoCap, it seems, have a great deal in common.