Since 2002 in France, social finance has supported 100,000 enterprises, provided decent housing to 38,000 individuals, and created or maintained more than 200,000 local jobs (36,000 in 2012 alone). But while these numbers are impressive, there are challenges to scaling the sector—currently, solidarity-based savings accounts for only 0.1 percent of household wealth. How can we do this? To start, we could make this savings opportunity more readily available to consumers—for example, by building it into other, more popular products such as life insurance, which makes up 40 percent of total French savings. Europe passed a regulation last March to create a European Social Entrepreneurship Fund (EuSEF), which increases the visibility and transparency of investment products—and therefore reach—among retail investors. The challenge now will be to implement it in member countries. Nicolas Hazard is vice chairman at Groupe SOS, the leading European social enterprise (10,000 employees, $750 million turnover) and chairman at Le Comptoir de l’Innovation, a company that invests, supports, and promotes the development of social enterprises around the world. He is also part of the European Commission social business expert group (GECES) and co-author of the essay “Lentreprise du XXIe siècle sera sociale (ou ne sera pas),” published in 2012.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 11:37:26 +0000
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