Tracy Palandjian

Tracy Palandjian is CEO and co-founder of Social Finance, a national impact finance and advisory nonprofit that builds innovative partnerships and investments to measurably improve lives. Since 2011, the firm has pioneered impact investments including the Social Impact Bond and the Career Impact Bond to mobilize capital at scale and deliver sustainable impact in communities across the United States.

Palandjian has worked for over a decade to reimagine the role of the capital markets in enabling social progress. Building on the work of Social Finance UK, Tracy co-founded Social Finance in 2011 with Sir Ronald Cohen and David Blood to launch the Social Impact Bond field in the United States. The firm became a fund manager in 2019 to launch its Career Impact Bond strategy, a financing model that improves economic mobility for unemployed and underemployed individuals. 

Prior to Social Finance, Palandjian was a managing director for eleven years at The Parthenon Group, where she established and led the nonprofit practice and worked with foundations and NGOs to accomplish their missions in the U.S. and globally. Palandjian also worked at Wellington Management Company and McKinsey & Company.

Palandjian is co-author of “Investing for Impact: Case Studies Across Asset Classes” and serves as vice chair of the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance and vice chair of the Global Steering Group on Impact Investing. She is an independent director of Affiliated Managers Group (NYSE: AMG), a trustee at the Surdna Foundation where she chairs the Investment Committee, and a director at the Boston Foundation.

Palandjian is a frequent speaker and writer on ESG and impact investing, social innovation, and results-oriented policy making, having been covered in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Economist, TIME, Institutional Investor, and Forbes.

A native of Hong Kong, Palandjian graduated from Harvard College with a BA magna cum laude in Economics and holds an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar.