Big Society Capital, the social investment wholesaler, has today published data on social investment deals worth £488m – around 32 per cent of the market.
The data, published on BSC's transparency pages, covers 716 deals from 30 social investors. The average social investment is for £706,000, but the median deal is around £200,000.
Around 72 per cent of investments were in the form of loans, and 60 per cent went to charities, while under 18 per cent went to organisations with no form of asset lock.
The majority of deals were secured loans, and the most common type of social investment deal was to buy an asset.
Only 85 out of 716 social investments were under £50,000, despite charities saying this was the level of investment they most commonly needed.
The largest investor featured, in terms of deals done, was Charity Bank, which supplied data on 162 deals.
Big Society Capital invests money in other social investment organisations, which then put money directly to the front line. It has started publishing deal level data as part of a drive to improve transparency in the social investment market, after it was criticised for not making enough information available.
In a blog accompanying the data BSC said: “Today we are publishing an updated deal level publication which includes Big Society Capital’s deals updated to June 2016 as well as social investment deals made by other investors and arranged by intermediaries which did not receive investment from BSC.
“In our last publication we had 237 transactions from 23 contributors and now we have increased that number to 716 transactions from 30 contributors. Comparing the coverage of the data to the recent Market Sizing report the dataset represents 31 per cent of committed capital. We recognise the resource requirement of providing data and are therefore very grateful to all of the organisations that contributed their data.
“We encourage everyone to explore the data and use it to answer questions one would have about what is happening in social investment and to help drive performance. We have already heard positive feedback on how the deal level data is being used by fund managers to benchmark their deployment as well as by charities and social enterprise to better understand how other organisations are using social investment.”
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