Henry Gonzalez, Saïd Business School MBA 2005
From Postings, 2006
Skoll Scholar Henry Gonzalez went to Morgan Stanley to learn how the rules of mainstream finance could help in developing capital for social change. As he explains, he ended up achieving rather more than he expected.
Financing social change is the area of social entrepreneurship that interests me the most. It was this topic that pushed me to pursue my Oxford MBA. Being a real finance novice, I took as many finance related courses as possible, which in honest truth sometimes made my studying a nightmare.
For my final project, I decided to carry out a paper aimed at analyzing the new growth of the microfinance industry and how it relates to the capital markets. This academic exercise was supplemented by an internship at Morgan Stanley’s Securitised Products Group (SPG) based in London.
My goal was to better understand mainstream finance in order to learn some lessons about the development of capital for social impact. The scope of my brief spell at the bank was to carry out an "industry analysis" of microfinance in order to see its potential as an emerging asset class. I carried out bibliographical and field research and briefed some of the bankers within the Fixed Income division who were keen to learn about the "double bottom line" impact of microfinance.
During the internship, the SPG department took advantage of a potential business opportunity – and invited me to participate in the frontline with a team pitching for an innovative cross-country securitisation deal involving microfinance loans. This was the firm’s first involvement with such a deal but its solid financial experience, multidisciplinary team and united strategy on mainstream microfinance won them the deal. Though I did not participate in the whole process, or in the technicalities of the deal structure, I was able to see how microfinance could be targeted to mainstream investors’ appetites as a nascent asset class that offers diversification, stability of returns, a decent yield and, above all, livelihood improvement.
My hope for this internship was that I would be able to raise awareness that there were now real market opportunities in the microfinance field.
What I could not have anticipated is that Morgan Stanley would be ready to act so quickly. This experience of mainstreaming financial solutions for innovation in the social sector encouraged me to seek further options in this area, and I recently joined Morgan Stanley’s Latin American Private Wealth Management
team.
Here, my aim is to provide investment advice to individuals and foundations; I hope to excite them to think about social impact across their investments, not just their philanthropic activities. I know it is still early, but the internship experience at Morgan Stanley last autumn left me optimistic that there is thirst to explore new frontiers to bring about lasting social change.