Symposium of the LSE Blended Finance Lab
29 September 2025, LSE Campus
The inaugural Symposium of the LSE Blended Finance Lab, held in London on September 29th 2025, brought together more than 75 organisations across government, development finance institutions, asset owners, asset managers, banks, NGOs, foundations, and academia to address the persistent gap between sustainable development financing needs and current levels of capital mobilisation. While blended finance is widely recognised as a critical tool for mobilising private capital towards development and climate goals, participants agreed that the market remains fragmented, under-scaled, and operationally inefficient.
The Symposium marked the formal launch of the Lab and showcased its early progress, including the establishment of five stakeholders-focused workstreams and two initial research projects. Across closed-door workstream sessions, participants identified common structural barriers to scaling BF, including limited project pipelines, lack of standardisation, insufficient data transparency, regulatory constraints, challenges around credit ratings, and misalignment between BF structures and institutional investor requirements. Clear priorities emerged for the Lab’s future work, notably in developing standardised tools and documentation, improving impact and concessionality measurement frameworks, strengthening data availability, advancing practitioner education, and supporting ecosystem coordination.
The public evening event reinforced the urgency of scaling blended finance by an order of magnitude to meet global climate and development goals, emphasising the role of project preparation, risk-sharing mechanisms, and innovative financing structures. Insights from the Symposium will directly inform the Lab’s 2026 work programme and its focus on delivering practical, market-relevant solutions.
Read the full conference report here
Two practitioner-focused research notes developed by the LSE Blended Finance Lab in 2025 were also presented and discussed during the symposium. Aligning Blended Finance Investments with Asset Owner Requirements, written by Jeroen Zuurmond, examines how blended finance structures can better fit institutional investors’ strategic asset allocation processes, risk-return expectations and mandate design. What are the challenges and opportunities of rating blended finance investments?, written by Sarah Marchand, explores the role of credit ratings in scaling the market, including issues related to sovereign risk, structural complexity, data availability and the need for greater standardisation. Both research notes can be downloaded below.
Credit ratings for blended finance structures
Aligning blended finance investments with asset owner requirements
This event was hosted by the Financial Markets Group and funded by the LSE School of Sustainability.