Social finance is a relatively new but prominent category of finance which promises social goods alongside profits. It draws upon large amounts of quantified data on social relations and realities, in order to create risk assessments and future profit projections. Scholarship in economic sociology and critical finance studies captures the quantification of social phenomena and practices of data coloniality in socially oriented finance. This can end up perpetuating finance’s projection as a global force that impacts and quantifies the social. Complicating this characterization, I use ethnographic methods and explore Geneva-based social finance professionals’ work practices and performances. Social finance professionals modulate between quantification practices to make social information legible to investors and affective embodiments of faith in markets and self-characterization as ‘activists’ working in finance. This modulation between multiple, seemingly disparate performances attracts investments and constitutes social finance markets. These ambivalent professional performances reveal the ways in which finance incorporates critique such as after the 2008 crisis and, renews faith in financial markets as a solution to social challenges.