Traditional finance structures struggle to deliver social impact at scale. Through deep engagement with leaders across sectors, BCG outlines how we can redesign blended finance to meet the demands of a just transition.
Douglas Beal
Partner and Director, Global Head of Impact and Integrated Transition for Financial Institutions New YorkEducation
- MBA, with honors, Columbia Business School
- BS, electrical engineering, Cornell University
Douglas Beal leads Boston Consulting Group’s client work with financial institutions on impact and integrated transition. Prior to his current role, he was the global head for economic development at the firm.
Douglas works with the world’s largest banks, asset managers, wealth managers, insurers, and development finance institutions (DFIs) and multilateral development banks (MDBs) to generate positive economic, social, and environmental impact with their core businesses, in a way that creates business benefits and is therefore sustainable and scalable. He works within the financial markets ecosystem to pursue an integrated or “just" transition, ensuring a convergence of economic, social and climate goals within projects and funds. Increasingly, catalytic and blended finance are needed as a key mechanism to achieve these goals, and Doug advises clients on how to take this topic which is often seen as subscale to one that can drive new opportunities with their own clients and across the enterprise.
He convenes stakeholders at the system level to collaborate on identifying ways for the private, public, and social sectors to support catalytic capital to scale, and has done this in collaboration with several organizations including the WEF, the WBCSD, and the United Nations. Having lived overseas for 21 years, he has acquired extensive experience on strategies and organizational capabilities advising the private sector, governments, and development organizations in the US, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. He has worked with several nations on their national development strategies and enablers of overall economic and socioeconomic progress.
Douglas is a cocreator of BCG's total societal impact (TSI) approach as well as the firm’s Sustainable Economic Development Assessment (SEDA), a statistical benchmarking tool used by many national government leaders and development organizations to improve economic and socioeconomic conditions. TSI and SEDA have been featured in numerous internationally read business newspapers and magazines, including The Economist and Financial Times.
He has served on the board of Save the Children in Hong Kong and currently sits on the advisory board for the Cornell Center for Global Sustainable Enterprise.
