At Capitals Coalition, we regularly capture perspectives from leading voices across finance, business, policy, sustainability, and the economy. Each month, we pick up on market signals and bring in an expert to make sense of them. In 300 words or less.
Two themes have dominated nature and finance conversations over the past month, and together they reveal just how much ground remains to be covered: the tension between data, knowledge and wisdom in nature-related decision-making, and the need for more predictable and stable policy signals to help investors embed nature and society into their strategies.
Analysis released recently calls for “market infrastructure development” to drive standards and information better able to support decision-making: investors recognise nature as a new investment theme, but they lack the infrastructure needed to scale beyond the pioneers (Ecosystem Marketplace, June 2026), and are challenged in translating awareness into actionable insight according to the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change with complex nature-related risks lacking clarity for decision-makers (IIGCC, June 2026). Similarly, interviews conducted by TNFD with business and finance executives highlight the critical importance of market signals and policy incentives (TNFD, November 2025). The Financial Markets Group goes further, conceding that investors cannot substitute for government action and that their influence is stronger when policy is supportive and weaker when it is not (FMG, May 2026), whilst KPMG’s Responsible Tax Program underscores that what the market needs is not headlines or temporary schemes, but genuine predictability in incentives (KPMG, February 2026).
It is precisely these challenges that we brought to Giulio Pasi, Policy Officer for Social and Sustainable Investments at the European Commission, who is working at the heart of the effort to build the signals and systems the market is calling for.
From data to decisions. Why credibility now depends on intelligence.
Credible market interactions don’t begin with better data. They begin with a better path through it: from data to information, from information to knowledge, and finally from knowledge to wisdom. That continuum is what produces decisions that inspire predictability and stability, even amid geopolitical turbulence and a general rethinking of what markets should be. And it matters most for the decisions sitting behind every single market interaction.
Walking that full continuum is now possible. Blending the most advanced social-science methods on impact measurement and management – and a new generation of accounting principles included – with AI and natural language processing is a powerful operation. And it has a name. Impact intelligence. This is the collective capacity of a system to learn from heterogeneous evidence, navigate its complexity without reducing it, and translate it into strategic decisions. This is not an abstraction.
Natural language processing already turns narrative reports into structured, comparable signals; rating systems let social performance be weighed across sectors; decision-support tools cut the information asymmetry investors face at the very moment they allocate capital; lived experience feeds directly into assessment; and shared infrastructure turns isolated reports into continuously growing knowledge stocks. The European Commission is now backing this build. It is the first time, anywhere, that a public authority has set out to construct the market infrastructure for social impact itself. It is groundbreaking, and it points to something larger: a future where social value is not merely funded, but verified, priced, and one day exchanged as a tradable asset.
The more impact intelligence becomes available, the more honestly we can examine the cultural assumptions our economic system rests on. We can do so without a war of religion. Without siding either with those who insist a trade-off between financial and social or environmental returns is always and forever there, or with those who promise the two necessarily move together. Perhaps we will learn that neither should be assumed. Whether one holds depends on the specific social or environmental sub-domain and on the market’s maturity and structure. This demands that we get sharper still and rely even more on impact intelligence.
Words by Giulio Pasi, Policy Officer for Social and Sustainable Investments at the European Commission
