Higher Impact, Stronger Returns: Findings from Quona’s 2025 Impact Review
By Kristin Sadler, Monica Brand Engel and Rafa de la Guia
A look inside Quona’s Annual Impact Performance Review, and what we’ve learned about the relationship between financial inclusion and financial returns.
How we measure impact
Quona is a leading venture and growth equity firm investing in fintech innovators across the world’s most dynamic markets. We back founders building category-defining companies in regions where the demand for better financial services is enormous and the opportunity to shape entire markets is unfolding. Our thesis is built on deep proximity to the fintech ecosystems where these companies are built and the customers they serve — from Bangalore to Mexico City, São Paulo to Cape Town, Singapore to Cairo, and beyond — and on a clear conviction that every company in our portfolio should expand or improve access to quality financial services for underserved consumers, MSMEs, and the systems that serve them.
But intent at investment is not the same as impact at scale, and impact at scale is not the same as financial performance. We wanted to know how all three relate, across our portfolio, over time.
To do that, Quona built a structured way of measuring impact that we could apply consistently across companies, funds, geographies, and business models. Every active core portfolio company is assessed annually using Quona’s impact scorecard, which rates direct impact (absolute scale, focus on underserved customers, product breadth, convenience, affordability, product-market fit) and indirect impact (market influence, capital crowded in, leadership diversity) using quantitative and qualitative data. Each company is then rated inline with the industry-wide ABCs of Impact framework, which sorts companies into tiers:
- Contributing to Solutions (highest tier): companies with significant direct impact at scale — critically, with a strong focus on underserved segments — and meaningful influence on the market and ecosystem
- Benefitting Stakeholders at Scale: companies delivering strong and growing direct impact, with demonstrated influence on the market
- Advancing Access: usually earlier-stage companies with strong impact theses but limited scale to date; we added this tier
- Acting to Avoid Harm: typically companies that have pivoted away from their original impact thesis
Our Annual Portfolio Impact Performance Review is now in its fifth year.
Our bar for Contributing to Solutions is deliberately high in Quona’s Annual Portfolio Impact Performance Review, with only 7 companies to date reaching this rating. Most of the portfolio is expected to sit at Benefitting Stakeholders at Scale as companies mature, and we treat that as a feature of methodological rigor, not a shortcoming.
The intention of the framework is not to declare some companies “good” and others “bad.” It is to make impact performance legible, comparable, and trackable over time so we can learn from it and factor these findings in refining our investment thesis. That long-running discipline is what made this year’s deeper analysis on financial inclusion and financial returns possible.
Putting the pattern to the test
For years, we have noticed a pattern in our Annual Impact Performance Reviews: the companies that earned the highest impact ratings tend to also be among our strongest financial performers. We have referenced this informally in LP communications and prior impact reports. But we wanted to test it rigorously: across all of our active funds, ~50 active core portfolio companies, and a decade of investing, does the correlation actually hold?
So we ran the analysis. We took every active core portfolio company, paired each one’s 2025 impact tier with its annualized revenue and current multiple on invested capital (MOIC), and looked at the patterns.
Note: MOIC is an imperfect measure of value creation. Quona takes a conservative approach to portfolio valuation, and many companies are scaling without the need for frequent equity raises, which means current MOICs likely understate the value creation underlying our portfolio today.
Impact & financial performance: A clear and consistent correlation
The companies delivering the strongest impact are also among the top financial performers in our portfolio. This finding holds across all funds, across geographies, and across business model types. A few specific patterns stood out:
Quona’s highest-impact companies are heavily concentrated at the top of the portfolio. 50% of the top MOIC quintile and 75% of the top revenue decile are rated Contributing to Solutions. And every Contributing to Solutions company sits in the top half of the portfolio by MOIC, with no exceptions.
The gaps between impact tiers are substantial. Mean MOIC at the Contributing to Solutions tier runs more than 3x higher than at the Benefitting Stakeholders tier, and median annualized revenue runs roughly 7x higher. Mean MOIC at Benefitting Stakeholders is itself nearly 2x higher than at the Advancing Access tier, where earlier-stage companies are still building scale.
The pattern strengthens with portfolio maturity, and holds across every fund.
- In our most mature fund, the Contributing to Solutions tier represents 40% of active companies and accounts for the top financial performers in the fund.
- In our middle-vintage fund, where the portfolio is still maturing, both Contributing to Solutions companies rank comfortably in the top half by MOIC, and several Benefitting Stakeholders companies sit just below the Contributing to Solutions threshold today and may well move up in the coming years.
- In our youngest fund, the only company that has reached the Contributing to Solutions tier so far is already one of the top financial performers in that fund.
- Our growth fund tells the same story from a different angle: by scaling early winners across earlier vintages, it concentrates capital in proven performers and amplifies their impact across the portfolio: every single holding is in the top two impact tiers, with more than half in the Contributing to Solutions tier, nearly four times the concentration in the broader portfolio. The correlation gets clearer, not weaker, as the portfolio matures.
The correlation runs through underserved customer focus. Plenty of fintechs reach significant scale in dynamic markets. Few do so while maintaining a strong focus on underserved customers. The ones that pull off both are the ones that consistently build the most durable, high-retention, defensible businesses for the global majority, and earn our highest impact rating in the process.
Same qualities, different lens
Same qualities, different lens. The attributes that earn a company a Contributing to Solutions rating, namely deep customer value, product-market fit, and meaningful market influence, are the same attributes that produce compounding growth and durable businesses in large, underpenetrated markets. An impact rating is not necessarily a separate judgment layered on top of a financial assessment. It is, in many ways, a reading of the same underlying signal from a different angle.
Underserved markets are large markets. Companies solving real inclusion problems for populations historically excluded from or underserved by formal finance are addressing the financial needs of the global majority — some of the largest unmet demand in the world. When they execute well at scale, strong financial performance tends to follow. Inclusion is the market opportunity, not a side constraint.
Impact and returns are not in tension. This is the headline. Across three funds and nearly a decade of investing in fintech in dynamic markets, serving underserved populations well has been one of the most consistent sources of financial outperformance in our portfolio, not a constraint on it.
That impact and financial returns can be mutually reinforcing is the core of Quona’s investment thesis, and our portfolio is increasingly showing that they are. The fact that we can see this pattern at all is a product of years spent specializing in fintech, embedded on the ground in the markets where these companies are built, and applying the same impact framework consistently year after year. We will keep exploring these linkages, refining the framework, and sharing what we learn.
For more on Quona’s Impact, please see our 2025 Impact Report.
