Building Systems, Not Scores: Designing Care as the Center of Investment Decisions

I started to see that they all traced back to one foundational gap: our financial systems are not built to care. Not care in the sentimental sense, but care as a principle of design: to consider all stakeholders, including society and the planet; to listen to those affected; to include lived experience in decision-making; and to take responsibility for the long-term consequences of capital allocation. ESG emerged from this very desire, to introduce responsibility and care into the financial system. And it succeeded in many ways: it raised global awareness, changed corporate norms, and mobilised unprecedented flows of capital. ESG-labelled funds managed more than $1.6 trillion globally in 2023 alone, and BlackRock’s carbon-transition ETF famously attracted over a billion dollars on its first day. The intention and the demand are clearly there. Which raises a deeper question: If the desire for responsible investing is so strong, how and why do our financial systems still default to optimisation rather than transformation?

A major part of the answer lies in how ESG became absorbed into the “optimisation machinery” of mainstream finance. As Pucker’s analysis in the Harvard Business Review explains, many ESG funds today resemble index-shadowing strategies that adjust portfolio weights but leave underlying systems untouched (2022). Their focus is largely on how social or environmental risks might affect company performance, not how companies affect people, communities, or ecosystems. These strategies often operate in secondary markets, constrained by short reporting cycles and the imperative to deliver competitive relative returns. As a result, caring about long-term societal or planetary outcomes rarely enters the actual decision-making architecture. ESG didn't fail because investors stopped caring; it failed because the system was never redesigned to integrate care meaningfully.

This realisation pushed me to explore frameworks that go deeper, particularly system-level investing, which is gaining traction among large, diversified investors. System-level investing acknowledges that financial returns depend on the health of broader environmental, social, and economic systems. It shifts the focus from optimising individual assets to safeguarding the resilience of the systems those assets rely on: stable climate systems, functioning labour markets, healthy populations, and institutional trust.

Transformative investing, as defined by the Deep Transitions Lab, builds on this foundation but pushes further. It acknowledges that some systems are not merely strained. They are outdated, unequal, and structurally incapable of meeting current and future needs. Transformative investing seeks to shift the underlying rules, norms, infrastructures, and power dynamics of socio-technical systems. Where system-level investing asks how to protect system health, transformative investing asks how to redesign systems so they produce more equitable, sustainable, and life-enhancing outcomes in the first place. It is not an alternative to system-level investing; it is its most ambitious frontier.

This distinction became especially vivid in the context of longevity. Today nearly 1 in 10 people globally is over 65, and by 2050 this number will reach 1.6 billion (UN DESA, 2024). Europe already has the oldest population in the world, over 21% of its citizens are 65+, and several countries exceed 24-25%. China will reach 30% aged 60+ by 2035. This demographic shift is not a theme. It is not a niche market. It is a structural transformation that affects every pillar of society: work, care, housing, financial security, and community. So, it forces societies to rethink how life across generations is organised.

Treating longevity as another thematic allocation would only replicate ESG’s shortcomings: narrow, reactive, and ultimately symbolic. The reality is that ageing populations expose deep inefficiencies and inequities embedded in existing systems. They highlight where care infrastructures are inadequate, where workplaces are exclusionary, where housing is incompatible with multigenerational needs, and where financial systems fail to protect people across longer lifespans. Longevity forces us to confront the fact that our systems were not designed for a world where people routinely live into their 80s, 90s, and beyond; and that redesign is no longer optional.

Our practicum work underscored this momentum for change. While the longevity economy is projected to grow massively in the upcoming decades, investments are heavily skewed: most capital flows to biotech and digital health (Longevity.Technology & L‑Nutra, 2023). Less than 2% of venture funding targets the everyday realities that determine quality of life for older adults, including care infrastructure, housing models, workforce innovation, financial inclusion, and community design (Senior Living Innovation Forum, 2025). Most solutions focus on the ‘young old,’ leaving significant gaps for lower-income and more vulnerable groups. The result is a profound innovation gap between what ageing societies need and what capital currently funds (World Economic Forum, 2025).

In searching for models that could bridge this gap, I kept returning to Acumen and 60 Decibels. What they illustrate is that listening can be made systematic. By grounding measurement in lived experience and collecting rigorous, comparable end-user data, they show that qualitative realities can become decision-relevant. For longevity investors, this matters. You cannot meaningfully shape the future of ageing without listening to older adults themselves. Community voice is not a ‘nice-to-have’; it is the only way to design interventions that actually improve lives.

As our team designed the recommendation, we treated these insights as guiding principles. Rather than creating a product that tilts portfolios toward ‘ageing-friendly’ categories, we asked what it would take to support system redesign. We drew from the World Economic Forum’s six longevity principles and the Deep Transitions framework to create a 1) fund that could invest in innovations reshaping the interconnected pillars of ageing (work, care, housing, financial inclusion, and community), and 2) impact framework through which we translated more abstract Deep Transition’s principles such as ‘include and give voice’ or ‘transform the system’ into actual indicators across individuals, enterprises, and systems. Designing the second inspired me to confront what caring actually means when translated into indicators. What we choose to measure becomes an ethical decision: metrics determine what we validate, reward, and ultimately enable. In impact measurement, we can either reinforce the optimisation logic that hollowed out ESG, or we can open the door to transformation by embedding community voice, system-level effects, and lived experience as core components of investment performance.

My understanding of the dilemmas I raised in my first blog post changed significantly over the course of this project. Intergenerational equity is not just about pension reform but about redesigning social contracts so people of all ages benefit from longer lives. Short-termism is not only a behavioural bias but a structural feature of a financial system built around fast feedback loops. Without redesigning incentives, caring for long-term outcomes becomes nearly impossible. And the global divide in healthy life expectancy revealed itself as a call for adaptability and humility. A longevity model cannot be exported wholesale across regions. It must be co-created with local communities, institutions, and ecosystems.

All in all, through SIRI, I learned that system change ultimately comes down to leadership. Leaders are the ones willing to act when incentives are misaligned, data is incomplete, and the benefits may not be visible for decades. Transformative investing is not just a technical approach, it is a form of stewardship. Longevity provided the perfect lens for seeing this, because it touches every dimension of human life and every stakeholder in society. It asks the fundamental question that traditional investing too often forgets: What world are we building, and for whom?

Care, in the end, is not a constraint on rational investment. It is its most powerful organizing principle.