Macquarie bets impact investing can fill an Asian finance gap

Yet across Asia-Pacific, banks hesitate to lend to women entrepreneurs. That’s partly due to stereotypes, but it’s also because lending criteria wasn’t designed to capture how female-led small- and medium-sized enterprises operate. As Diana Tjoeng, head of Asia for Sydney-based NGO Good Return points out, demale business owners may lack official identity documents and formal credit histories, even if they’ve run their businesses for decades.

“The specific barrier is capital,” says Lisa George, global head of the Macquarie Group Foundation. “Without access to capital, it’s very hard to get social mobility and educational mobility in life.”

Earlier this year, the Macquarie Group Foundation committed one million Australian dollars ($696,000) to an impact investment fund managed by Good Return, which works to expand access to finance for women-led businesses across Asia-Pacific. The two groups have worked together since 2022, when Macquarie took part in what was then a proof-of-concept guarantee fund targeting women-led small- and medium-sized enterprises in Cambodia and Indonesia. 

Good Return’s first impact investment fund closed at one million Australian dollars. That seed capital, deployed as loan guarantees to local financial institutions, catalysed five million Australian dollars (approximately $3.5 million) in loans to more than 600 small businesses. The fund targets the “missing middle,” with loans of around $1000 to $100,000 in size.

“Macquarie was really pleased with the results of the first fund,” says Shane Nichols, CEO of Good Return. “Their team provided pro bono support to us to help us design and structure our new fund.”

Diana Tjoeng, Good Return’s head of Asia, cites the example of a female farmer in Cambodia, who was able to take out a loan of around $8000 from a commercial bank without putting up collateral, thanks to a guarantee from Good Return’s first fund. The money allowed her to build two greenhouses, adding two cabbage harvests to her rice harvest and thus increase her income. 

Good Return’s second fund is structured as an evergreen vehicle: rather than returning capital to investors at a fixed end date, it recycles proceeds back into fresh loan guarantees on a rolling basis.” The organisation estimates the model could unlock 50 million Australian dollars ($35 million) in loans to women-led businesses every five years.

Corporate philanthropy

For Macquarie, the Good Return partnership sits within a long tradition of corporate philanthropy. The Macquarie Group Foundation was established in 1985 by David Clarke, the executive chairman of Macquarie. 

“As a company is a member of the society in which it operates, it follows that one of its important duties is to work in a multitude of ways for the betterment of society,” Clarke said at the Foundation’s formation. Since its founding, the Foundation has contributed a cumulative 698 million Australian dollars ($487 million) to community organisations.

“Our founding chairman believed a company had an obligation to support the communities in which we operate,” George says. “Not only did he believe that about the company, he believed that about the individuals in the company.” In the most recent financial year, more than a third of eligible staff globally participated in some form of community activity, which, according to George, includes activities like running interview and CV workshops for young Australians and refugees.

“The biggest benefit we get from corporate philanthropy is in employee engagement,” she continues. “It’s a positive halo effect for our most important stakeholder, the people that come in and out of the doors every day.”

Most of the Foundation’s work is in Macquarie’s home of Australia, focusing on helping Australians find employment. “Good Return is probably the exception, rather than the rule,” George says. The Foundation added impact investing to its work five decades ago to complement its traditional grantmaking process; the hope is that the Foundation’s work will generate some return that can be recycled into other projects. 

It’s a contrast to views in the U.S., where the idea of stakeholder capitalism—the idea that companies owe value to employees, customers, and communities, not just shareholders—faces a political backlash. Major U.S. companies including BlackRock, Meta, and Bank of America have quietly backed away from their diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments.

George, however, sees a different trajectory in Asia-Pacific: growing wealth across the region is creating a new generation of business leaders who want to formalise their social commitments in ways their peers in Europe and North America long have.

Microfinance’s fall from grace

The idea that small amounts of credit could lift countries out of poverty was once one of international development’s most celebrated beliefs. Pioneered by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the model quickly spread across South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia through the 1990s and 2000s. 

But a proliferation of weakly-regulated microfinance institutions led to a backlash. MFIs were associated with high levels of debt, yet didn’t lead to the development benefits promised by its proponents. 

“The microfinance sector has been through an evolution,” Nichols says, “from being the wonder child, probably put on a pedestal it didn’t deserve to be on, to today, where it’s part of a broader financial inclusion discussion.” 

“Whether it’s somewhere safe to save, whether it’s a loan for education or a productive use, the ability to safely transfer money—everyone needs access to that, regardless of wealth level.”