The one problem every impact investor named
We recently sat down with three of the people who deeply understand impact capital in Brazil: Fernanda Camargo, Fernanda Dativo, and Georgia Marmontti. Each works at a different point of the capital stack, and we asked them to go deep on a problem we already know well at Mútua: the market's missing layer of shared intelligence, the absence of common data and common language that would let capital and organizations find one another.
From three different vantage points, they traced the same root problem, and each showed how it bites differently depending on where you sit. This is the juice of that conversation.
Meet the speakers
Fernanda Camargo spent more than thirty years in traditional finance—brokerage floors in the early 1990s, Merrill Lynch in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, emerging-market bonds at a treasury desk—before co-founding Wright Capital, a multi-family office that manages wealth for families, institutes, and endowments with mandatory impact allocations. She is also a persistent regulatory advocate, having helped bring about the CVM's regulatory sandbox for impact and blended finance and pushed major pension funds toward ESG risk policies.
Fernanda Dativo came out of M&A and corporate credit before moving into impact, first building one of Brazil's earliest collective-lending platforms for social businesses, then allocating capital for family offices. She now co-builds early-stage impact companies at the venture builder Dynamo, which makes direct equity investments and works hands-on with founders.
Georgia Marmontti started in infrastructure investment, spent time in remote Amazonian communities at an impact accelerator, and worked at the World Bank's IFC before joining Fama Investimentos. There she runs a credit fund that lends specifically to socio-bioeconomy cooperatives in the Amazon.
What we’ve heard
Camargo's frustration is the absence of shared infrastructure. In traditional markets, she noted, everything was mapped: there was a taxonomy, the language was standardized, and she could compare one asset against another. In impact, none of it existed. "How is it," she asked, "that we don't have a Bloomberg for this?" Without that shared layer, every fund runs its diagnostics by hand and pays, from scratch, for knowledge other funds have already bought.
Dativo described impact capital as a spectrum rather than a single instrument—what the field half-jokingly calls "fifty shades of blended finance." Each kind of money is built to absorb a different kind of risk, and the wrong instrument at the wrong moment does damage. Give a young venture a loan before it understands its own revenue, she warned, and "you could be killing that business." Her point was that grants, catalytic capital, equity, and credit only work if they arrive in the right order—and that requires each player knowing what the others have already done.
Marmontti made the same gap concrete from the credit seat. She described doing months of diligence on an Amazonian cooperative—reconstructing financial statements by hand because the organization has no audited books—only to learn another fund had done the same work before her. That earlier fund's diligence, she said, was "still sitting on a drive to this day." Every new lender starts from zero.
She was equally blunt about the math. A fund generally doesn't stand up below roughly R$40-50million, the fixed costs of regulation, a risk desk, and a team don’t close. With a 50 million fund, a standard 2% management fee yields about R$ 500,000 a year - which has to cover salaries, legal fees, auditing, travel and compliance. Against that budget, landing R$100,000 to a small cooperative takes as much diligence as lending R$2 million to a company, sometimes more, registering loan collateral adds roughly two percentage points to the borrower's rate; and a quarter to a third of the portfolio needs renegotiation in any given cycle, each case another month or two of work.
Camargo added the layer above the funds: even where capital exists, regulation decides where it can go, and those rules shift with the political cycle. Her view on how large-scale change in the capital markets actually happens was unsentimental: "it will not come from good will, it will have to come from regulation." She also pointed to what she and her clients call the colonization of capital, wealth generated in the Global South routinely flows to custody banks in the North, which then decline to hold the vehicles that would channel it back into Southern solutions.
What this teaches us, and where it bites hardest
The lesson worth drawing is not that impact investing is hard, but that the same root problem surfaces at every level of the market, named independently by people who occupy different parts of the ecosystem. There is no shared, maintained intelligence about who is doing what. Marmontti loses diligence to a drive; Dativo watches instruments arrive out of sequence; Camargo can't compare one opportunity to another the way any bond trader takes for granted. All three also treat it as structural rather than a matter of effort or goodwill: the market simply was never built with these rails.
What that missing layer costs, though, depends entirely on where you sit, and this is where the particularities matter. For Marmontti in credit, it bites as unit economics: the deals that do the most good are precisely the ones her fee structure can least afford to originate, because a small loan demands the same work as a large one. For Dativo in venture building, it bites as sequencing and, increasingly, liquidity: getting the right kind of capital to founders at the right stage, then finding a way to exit in a market that has turned sharply risk-averse. For Camargo, who represents asset owners, it bites as coordination and regulation: pooling heterogeneous family wealth into shared vehicles, and changing the rules that otherwise keep institutional capital locked in conventional assets. The same absence felt three different ways.
There was also shared recognition that new tools could ease parts of this. AI can now turn a cooperative's messy, unstructured financials into something the next fund can read. Tokenization, they argued, may be the mechanism that finally lets small checks reach small organizations. And there is real appetite in government and development banks to fund the shared digital rails on which many specialized funds could operate over common data. None of them presented these as a solution—only as some of the many pieces a problem this size would require. It is also the gap Mútua is working to close: mapping how capital actually flows across the ecosystem so funders and organizations can see one another.
The takeaway
Three managers, three seats, one problem. What makes the conversation worth reporting is that people working in different parts of the same ecosystem diagnosed it independently and arrived at the same place. That convergence is the signal. Seeing the problem clearly, from every seat at once, is where the work begins.
This piece summarizes a conversation with three fund managers working across the impact capital spectrum in Brazil: Fernanda Dativo (Dynamo), Fernanda Camargo (Wright Capital), and Georgia Marmontti (Fama Investimentos).
