Explore every episode of the podcast SRI360 | Sustainable & Responsible Investing, Impact Investing, ESG, Socially Responsible Investing
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| Impact Investing's Retreat: Purification or Defeat? Who's Leaving & Who's Quietly Building? | Antony Bugg-Levine, GIIN Co-Founder (#148) | 02 Oct 2026 | 01:21:28 | |
$27 billion left sustainable funds in a single quarter last year. Is impact investing being defeated, or purified? One of the people in the room when the field got its name says the money that left was never committed, and the most exciting work now is being done by people who don't write press releases about it. I'm joined by Antony Bugg-Levine, Managing Director of Bugg-Levine, Inc., co-founder of the Global Impact Investing Network, and author of Investing in America: Expanding Access to Finance to Solve Our Shared Challenges. He ran the Nonprofit Finance Fund for a decade, and as a young man he wrote the last speech Nelson Mandela gave as president. His argument starts with a loan. He grew up in a politically active family in apartheid Johannesburg and got to Yale only because someone lent him the money — and fair access to financing became the throughline of his career. In 2007, after a back-of-the-envelope calculation convinced him there would never be enough money in philanthropy and government to solve the problems he cared about, he convened the meeting on Lake Como where “impact investing” got its name. He doesn’t remember who said it first, and thinks that’s beautiful. Nineteen years later, he’s asking harder questions of the field he helped build. He started on “Team Unlock More Money for Impact” and now says he’s been, “if you could call it,” radicalized: mainstream capital has had a generation to move further and faster than it has. He also offers a simple gut check for any impact claim — does the methodology ever speak to someone whose life it claims to improve? The share of the market that fails it, he says, whatever it is, is too high. In this episode we discuss:
Featured guest: Antony Bugg-Levine, Managing Director, Bugg-Levine, Inc.; Co-Founder, Global Impact Investing Network; Author, Investing in America His test for any impact claim: does the methodology ever speak to someone whose life it claims to improve? — https://www.bugglevine.com/ Listen next: Ep 106: Accidental Father of Impact: Nick O'Donohoe on Leading BSC, BII & Building Investability in Emerging Markets Discover More from SRI360°: Explore all episodes of the SRI360° Podcast Sign up for the free weekly email update Key Takeaways:
About the SRI 360° Podcast: The SRI 360° Podcast is focused only on sustainable and responsible investing. In each episode, I interview a world-class investor who is an accomplished practitioner from all asset classes. I cover everything from their early personal journeys to how they built and ran their investment strategies, and the challenges they face today. Each episode is a chance to go below the surface with these impressive people and learn useful lessons from professional investors. Connect with SRI360°: Sign up for the free weekly email update: https://sri360.com/newsletter/ Visit the SRI360° PODCAST: https://sri360.com/podcast/ Visit the SRI360° WEBSITE: https://sri360.com/ Follow SRI360° on X: https://twitter.com/SRI360Growth/ Follow SRI360° on FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/SRI360Growth/ Additional Resources Antony Bugg-Levine — website: https://www.bugglevine.com/ Antony Bugg-Levine — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antony-bugg-levine-04058639/ Book — Investing in America: Expanding Access to Finance to Solve Our Shared Challenges: https://investinginamerica.us/ Global Impact Investing Network: https://thegiin.org/ Nonprofit Finance Fund: https://nff.org/ Columbia Business School — Capital for Good podcast featuring Antony: https://business.columbia.edu/socialenterprise/initiatives/capital-good-program/podcast/bugg-levine Related SRI360° Episodes: | |||
| Africa's Risk Premium Is A Myth: What the Default-Rate Data Actually Shows | Andrew Johnstone, Climate Fund Managers (#147) | 22 Sep 2026 | 01:44:20 | |
Africa carries a risk premium far greater than its actual risk. Fifty years of development-lending and World Bank data show the probability of loss on African infrastructure projects is on par with, or lower than, developed markets. My guest has spent a decade building a fund designed around that mispricing. Andrew Johnstone is the Co-Founder and CEO of Climate Fund Managers (CFM), a blended-finance platform managing just over $3 billion across renewable energy, water and oceans, green hydrogen, and — most recently — private credit. He was a civil engineer who started out designing roads in KwaZulu-Natal before he ever financed one. Andrew was born in Johannesburg to British parents who emigrated to South Africa after World War II. His father was a mechanical engineer on the mines, and the family moved to Pietermaritzburg when Andrew was 18 months old. He followed his father into engineering — civil, "just to really break the mold" — earning a BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Natal on a bursary from the Natal Roads Department, where he spent his university vacations surveying, setting out roads and fixing graders. After national service as a lieutenant in the South African Air Force and a stretch backpacking, he moved to the UK, completed an MBA in Engineering Management and Finance at City University London, and pivoted from the technical side toward finance. A year in Brazil implementing toll road concessions around Rio de Janeiro followed, then a return to South Africa in 1997 — the year the country won the Rugby World Cup — to work for the construction company Group Five. In 2000, he joined Macquarie as one of two people building an infrastructure team in South Africa. In partnership with Old Mutual, they took over management of the South African Infrastructure Fund — the first African infrastructure fund, established in 1996 — from Standard Bank. That business became African Infrastructure Investment Managers (AIIM), where Andrew rose to CEO while also serving as Chairman of Macquarie Africa. Over roughly 15 years and seven funds, he watched infrastructure evolve from what he calls "a very boring sector" nobody cared about into an institutional asset class. His lasting lesson from that chapter: institutions matter, and partnerships have a lifespan — you need the skill to curate, manage and eventually unwind them. By 2015, at the peak of the platform's success and about to launch fund number eight, he concluded the model wasn't winning. Demand for infrastructure was outstripping delivery, and the deficiency wasn't money, intent or opportunity — it was the method. Project finance assumes risk can be defined, parameterised and allocated at a fixed moment in time. In practice, on a toll road in Nigeria, the list is never complete, the parameters never hold, and the risks keep changing. He had presided over projects that took eight years to reach financial close. So he resigned, told his wife he never wanted to be a fund manager or a CEO again — and roughly 18 months later, through Climate Policy Initiative's Innovation Lab for Climate Finance, co-founded CFM as a joint venture between the Dutch development bank FMO and Sanlam InfraWorks of South Africa's Sanlam Group. Much of our conversation is about the architecture that came out of that "petri dish." CFM's whole-of-life model splits a project's life into three funds — development, construction and operations — each with capital comfortable at that stage of risk. The static thing is the project; the money moves in and out. Construction is financed with equity because it is faster, and the cost of that equity is brought down by blending at the fund level: a 20% first-loss tranche, a 40% commercial tranche, and a 40% senior tranche, distributed by waterfall rather than pro rata. The project company sees one check of 100. Climate Investor One has developed more than 70 projects, built 16, refinanced seven or eight, and completed three exits. We also get into the debt-for-nature swap around the Galápagos Islands, where CFM bought Ecuadorian bonds trading at distressed yields — the market wanted 19%, CFM only needed 10% — and split the difference between fiscal relief for the government and conservation funding that expanded the marine protected area by 50%, mobilising $90 million of commercial capital into a conservation outcome. And we discuss the GAIA Climate Loan Fund, CFM's move into private credit for sovereign and sub-sovereign borrowers alongside MUFG, FinDev Canada and the Green Climate Fund, designed to lend in local currency, over longer tenors, without the sovereign counter-guarantee that multilateral lenders typically require. Andrew is direct about what the industry gets wrong. He argues the real constraint in Africa is absorption rate, not asset performance — and he challenges the premise that credit enhancement is meant to make the future less risky: "Tomorrow isn't less risky than today. It never will be." He says he has yet to sit in an investment or credit committee that asks whether it is taking enough risk. I also put the hardest question to him directly: if these deals can't happen without public money sitting in first loss, in what sense are the returns commercial — and why the private equity fee structure on top? His answer is that the blend absorbs risk rather than enhancing returns, that the waterfall means there is no scenario in which the manager earns carry while public capital loses money, and that CFM and its shareholders are collectively among the largest investors in their own funds. What stayed with me is his candour about scale. CFM manages just over $3 billion, against a global climate funding requirement he puts at $5 trillion a year. "Yes, it's an interesting and funky model," he says, "but three billion doesn't really cut it." The answer, he believes, lies in standardisation — because with standardisation comes replication, and with replication comes scale. Listen Next: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2014049/episodes/19365985 Discover More from SRI360°:
Chapters: 00:00:00 Cold open 00:02:07 Episode preview: meet Andrew Johnstone 00:03:11 Welcome: when COVID hit the construction sites 00:03:51 A continuity plan that stopped at one week 00:07:21 What standing on site teaches a CEO 00:09:18 Every assumption is wrong: risk tolerance and time 00:10:38 Growing up in South Africa 00:12:46 Roads department, Air Force, MBA, Brazil 00:14:57 Joining Macquarie and Africa's first infrastructure fund 00:17:13 Macquarie and Old Mutual: an unlikely partnership 00:19:50 Why institutions and partnerships matter 00:22:17 Walking away in 2015 00:25:43 The Paris Agreement and the Innovation Lab 00:28:13 Frustrated project financiers, liberated blended financiers 00:32:55 First loss: shock absorbers for risky territory 00:35:45 CFM today: from renewables to Gaia private credit 00:42:08 135 people, four hubs, $3B AUM 00:43:52 Pace, impact and profit 00:45:54 The whole-of-life model: three funds, three houses 00:51:41 20/40/40: how the capital stack pays out 00:56:25 Why $3B isn't enough: turning 3 into 30 00:58:28 What makes a project bankable, and what kills it 01:01:35 Africa's risk premium vs. the real risk 01:04:33 Are emerging market default rates really lower? 01:06:08 The OECD's "cottage industry" verdict 01:07:45 Why blended finance hasn't standardized 01:09:43 Adaptation and the Galapagos debt-for-nature swap 01:13:33 Gaia: lending to cities and governments 01:18:19 The exit problem and bridge to bond 01:23:03 Shrinking aid budgets and the return of infrastructure 01:25:40 The fee question: are these returns really commercial? 01:31:18 Who takes the risk, who gets the carry? 01:34:01 The next ten years: heat, energy, water 01:36:03 The weapon is money 01:36:34 Rapid fire: the missing cost of carbon 01:38:15 What he wishes he'd known in 2015 01:39:20 The Thailand project that should have died sooner 01:40:22 The investment that beat expectations 01:41:19 Where to start a climate finance career 01:41:54 Wrap-up 01:42:17 Where to find Andrew and CFM 01:43:16 Outro | |||
| Impact Investing’s Bottleneck: It’s Not Capital... Why Isn’t the Money Moving? | Laurie Spengler, Courageous Capital Advisors (#146) | 09 Sep 2026 | 01:23:57 | |
“Walking away is actually discipline. It's not failure, it's discipline.” — Laurie Spengler In this episode, I speak with Laurie Spengler, Founder and CEO of Courageous Capital Advisors and Founding Partner of Mondiale Impact, about why capital without capacity fails, the danger of treating patient capital as permanent capital, and the path from establishing legal clinics in homeless shelters in Boston to structuring billion-dollar blended finance vehicles. Laurie grew up in New Jersey watching her serial-entrepreneur father fix and grow small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the real economy. After studying political science and economics at Stanford and teaching for a year in Taiwan, she attended Harvard Law School. During this time, while volunteering at the homelessness legal clinic in Boston, she represented a homeless Vietnam veteran. On winning the hearing and a Section 8 voucher for housing access for her client, he turned to her and said "So, Laurie, this is great. Where am I going to sleep tonight?". She then realized that legal rights without physical infrastructure were hollow. She and her classmates then successfully petitioned corporate-track graduates to pledge 1% of their future salaries to fund public interest law positions—her first aligned capital stack. After Harvard, she joined White & Case and was posted to Czechoslovakia just as the Berlin Wall fell. While the market focused on massive sovereign privatizations like the Škoda-Volkswagen deal, she noticed that the SMEs making up the real economy were starved for growth equity. So she founded the Central European Advisory Group in Prague, a dual legal and corporate finance firm built on the thesis that advice and capital must be integrated. She ran it for more than a decade before selling to her management team. She subsequently became CEO of ShoreBank International—later merged and rebranded as Enclude, which she eventually sold to Palladium—building an FCA-regulated broker-dealer business to intermediate capital globally. In 2020, she founded Courageous Capital Advisors to act as a specialized transaction intermediary. The model is built around a single leading question: what is the capital solving for? She operates globally across private equity and debt, structuring a $500 million affordable housing credit fund with Symbiotics, raising holding company loan notes for BRAC, and securing common equity for Southern Bancorp. She was also a core architect of the SDG Loan Fund, a radically simple blended structure where a $25 million MacArthur Foundation guarantee unlocked $111 million in first-loss capital from FMO, mobilizing $1 billion from Allianz—a 40:1 mobilization ratio. Much of our conversation is about why the impact industry is trapped by its own mechanisms. She argues that the industry's focus on deal-by-deal binary decisions blinds allocators to opportunities, and that evaluating risk, volatility, and thematic intersections at the portfolio level could fundamentally expand capital flows. She is clear-eyed about what does not work. When capital terms are dictated purely by allocators, misalignment is inevitable. She refuses to shoehorn a deal into a mismatched structure, treating the willingness to walk away as a necessary discipline. But when aligned correctly, the upside surprises: she points to the exit of Fenix to ENGIE, creating a liquidity event for every single employee, from the security guards to the C-suite. We also get into her governance work with Mondiale Impact. She argues that factoring in long-term ecological and social shifts is not a concession or an ESG liability, but a strict fiduciary duty of care for corporate boards navigating a changing world. What stayed with me is her realism about what it takes to actually move the needle. Thirty years after realizing the gap between a legal right and a physical resource at Rosie’s Place, she admits the macro funding gap remains wide open. To close it, she argues, we can no longer rely on the "pull" of the marketplace—we need the "push" of institutional leadership shifting the mandate from whether to allocate for impact, to how. Listen to the full conversation. Listen Next: IIX Orange Bonds Lifting MILLIONS of Women in Asia & Africa! | Robert Kraybill Discover More from SRI360°:
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| Does Impact Cost You Anything? 4 Funds Answer With Real Numbers, Not Theory (#145) | 02 Sep 2026 | 01:05:20 | |
Four investors. One hard question: does impact actually pay, and how do you prove it? This is a compilation episode of SRI360, pulling together four conversations that answer that question from four seats at the table — growth equity, private equity sustainability, infrastructure, and the policy world trying to move trillions. None treats impact simply as a discount you accept for doing good. Across four very different perspectives, they make the case that impact and financial success can — and increasingly must — work together. Maya Chorengel of TPG’s Rise Fund only invests where impact and financial return are “collinear” — where the two rise together — and screens every deal for a 20%+ gross IRR and a measurable impact floor, using a formal equation built by TPG’s in-house team. Cornelia Gomez of General Atlantic reduces the whole sustainability question to three value-creation levers — revenue, cost, and exit — and can name a company’s three “hot potatoes” in ten minutes. Anish Majmudar of M&G runs a real-assets impact fund with roughly $750 million committed across 100-plus projects, built on the argument that infrastructure is where impact and cash flow line up most naturally. And Kieron Boyle of the Impact Investing Institute works the other end — trying to pull the trillions sitting in mainstream capital markets and family offices into the field. Taken together, they map how impact investing actually underwrites, measures, and defends itself — at a moment when the whole category is under political fire. In this episode we discuss:
Featured guests:
Maya Chorengel — The Rise Fund (TPG) Full SRI360° episode (EP50): https://sri360.com/podcast/maya-chorengel/ Cornelia Gomez — General Atlantic Anish Majmudar — M&G plc Kieron Boyle — Impact Investing Institute Discover More from SRI360°:
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| In 2021 This Sounded Like Activism — Then Fossil Fuels Lost a Decade: The Stranded-Asset Call, Five Years On | Ron Gonen, Closed Loop Partners (#144) | 26 Aug 2026 | 00:40:09 | |
In the autumn of 2021, Ron Gonen sat across from me and made a call that sounded like activism: fossil fuel assets were already stranded, the smart money was gone, and anyone divesting that year was a decade too late. He said it during the best year energy stocks had had in a decade. For eighteen months, he looked flat wrong. He wasn’t. This is a re-release, and before the interview I score the thesis against what actually happened. In 2024 the S&P’s fossil fuel components returned 5.7% against 25% for the index; the sector has underperformed in seven of the last ten years and shrunk from 30% of the index in 1980 to about 3% today. The regulation he predicted arrived: seven states now have packaging producer-responsibility laws, up from two. And the single national recycling company he said the US needed — which did not exist when we spoke — he built a year later. It’s Circular Services, now the largest privately held recycler in the US, with close to a billion dollars behind it from Brookfield, Microsoft, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Starbucks and Unilever. Ron Gonen is the Founder and CEO of Closed Loop Partners, an investment firm and innovation center built entirely around the circular economy. He founded and ran RecycleBank, served as New York City’s Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling and Sustainability, and wrote The Waste-Free World. In this conversation he lays out why the linear “extract, use, landfill” economy is a subsidised anomaly, why he thinks circular investing carries a clear financial edge rather than a moral discount, and how he underwrites it — value investing, price-to-value discipline, and a corporate LP base that tells him where the market is going before it gets there. The one part he under-called was the politics — and that’s the live risk. Federal policy went the other way, every gain came from the states, and the fight he once compared to a bug bite is now a 17-state lawsuit. He was right on the assets, the regulation, and the infrastructure. The open question is whether the politics catches up. In this episode we discuss:
Featured guest:
Discover More from SRI360°:
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| Base of the Pyramid to Pension Fund: What Four Emerging-Market Funds Actually Returned | BlueOrchard · BII · IIX · EPIC World (#143) | 17 Aug 2026 | 00:55:33 | |
🌎 Get the latest updates on Sustainable & Responsible Investing at: https://sri360.com/newsletter/ From a $200 microloan in Peru to a bond sold almost exclusively to pension funds in Singapore: four emerging-market funds, one question almost no one answers in public — what actually returned? Impact investing has a disclosure problem. The frameworks multiplied. AUM keeps growing. But deal-level outcomes — loss rates, exits, the defaults that didn't happen — almost never get discussed openly. In this compilation episode, they do. Philipp Mueller, who at the time of recording was CEO of BlueOrchard, runs the world's largest microfinance fund - $2.4 billion deployed through a single-intermediary model across emerging and frontier markets, with 110 staff across Lima, Nairobi, Tbilisi, and Singapore. Nick O'Donohoe spent seven years as CEO of British International Investment, where a 2% return target became a 5% actual return — in an environment where almost every African country went through major macroeconomic or political turmoil during his tenure. Robert Kraybill, CIO and Managing Director at Impact Investment Exchange, built the Women's Livelihood Bond, six issuances, $228 million raised, listed on the Singapore Exchange, with the sixth bond sold almost exclusively to pension funds. And Jyotsna Krishnan, CEO and Co-Founder of EPIC World, has spent her career mapping the 70% of India's population that remains nearly invisible to global allocators and building the data infrastructure that makes it investable. One argument connects all four: the risk is mispriced. And the evidence is now there to prove it. Featured guests:
Listen Next: In Case You Missed It: Must-Hear Conversations Shaping Impact in 2026 (#129)" Link is https://sri360.com/podcast/conversations-shaping-impact/ Discover More from SRI360°:
Here's what you're in for: 02:20 – Philipp Mueller, Blue Orchard: The World's Largest Microfinance Fund 02:29 – What Microfinance Is — and Why It Isn't a Donation 04:24 – Ticket Sizes, Markets & How Loan Sizes Vary by Geography 07:17 – Getting Capital from Investor to Base-of-the-Pyramid Borrower 08:08 – Single-Intermediary Model: Due Diligence, Credit Rating & Impact Assessment 11:06 – One Layer Only — and Why That Preserves Accountability 11:43 – Corruption, Rule of Law & Why Blue Orchard Avoids Government-Linked Institutions 13:42 – Real-World Impact: The Leather Craftsman in Piura, Peru 16:40 – Bridge 1 16:59 – Nick O'Donohoe, BII: Patient & Flexible Capital — What Those Words Mean at a DFI 18:33 – The 2% Return Target & the False Dichotomy on Market-Rate Returns 21:06 – How a 2% Target Became a 5% Actual Return 23:00 – Portfolio Construction: Catalyst & Growth, Balancing Impact with Return 25:00 – The Catalyst Portfolio: Designed for Investments Beyond Normal Risk Tolerance 26:08 – The PSI Impact Score: A Framework Investment Officers & Committees Could Both Trust 29:18 – Bridge 2 29:32 – Robert Kraybill, IIX: Empowering Women at the Intersection of Gender & Climate 30:14 – IIX's Theory of Change: Promoting Impact Investing as a Market, Not a Product 30:56 – The Women's Livelihood Bond: Genesis, Structure & $228 Million Raised 38:31 – First Loss, Senior Bonds & the Blended Finance Structure Explained 39:37 – Listed on the Singapore Exchange: Idealistic & Practical Reasons 41:36 – Bridge 3 41:51 – Jyotsna Krishnan, EPIC World: The Entrepreneurial Household as an Economic Unit 43:45 – The Biggest Misconception: Why This Market Isn't Risky 45:22 – 70% of India's Population & What the Unseen Middle Actually Means 45:51 – Why Businesses Built for Discretionary Spends Fail the Non-Discretionary 90% 50:48 – Field Visit to Damoh: Women-Led Farmer Producer Companies & Generational Change 54:30 – Outro | |||
| The $120 Trillion Repricing: 4 Investors on the Carbon Bubble, Stranded Assets & Real Returns | (#142) | 06 Aug 2026 | 01:00:25 | |
Four investors. Four asset classes. One question: where does real money actually go to work on climate? In this compilation episode, I revisit conversations with four investors who put real money to work in the physical economy, across greenhouses, Indian agrifood, forests, and the fossil fuel reserves sitting on public markets. They approach climate from very different asset classes, and the contrast is the point. Dave Chen of Equilibrium Capital treats farming as infrastructure — building and operating some of the largest high-tech greenhouses in North America, and buying technology only once it hits the cost curve. Mark Kahn of Omnivore, India’s pioneering agrifood VC, argues that mitigation is sexy and adaptation is gritty, and that a country about to become too hot to farm has no choice but to fund the gritty one. Radha Kuppalli Former MD, Impact & Advocacy at New Forests explains how a forest became two assets at once — timber and carbon — and how you underwrite a biological asset you cannot harvest for thirty years. And Mark Campanale, who coined the term “unburnable carbon,” lays out the thesis that halved the reserve life of the global oil and gas sector: the market is carrying far more fossil fuel than it can ever burn. Together they map how capital is repricing land, forests, food, and fossil reserves — and where the returns are hiding in each. In this episode we discuss:
Featured guests:
Discover More from SRI360°:
Dave Chen — Equilibrium Capital Mark Kahn — Omnivore Radha Kuppalli — New Forests Mark Campanale — Carbon Tracker Initiative | |||
| A 1% Loss Rate “Unheard Of” in Frontier Markets: How Local-Currency Lending Rewrites African Credit Risk | Clemens Calice, Cygnum Capital (#141) | 30 Jul 2026 | 01:26:02 | |
🌎 Get the latest updates on Sustainable & Responsible Investing at: https://sri360.com/newsletter/ A local-currency bond fund put roughly $600 million to work across some of the credit markets the world rates as riskiest — and lost about 1% of it, over 11 years. That record belongs to Clemens Calice, who walked out of Goldman Sachs in 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis, with two colleagues and no business plan. What he built became Cygnum Capital — today a $1.5 billion platform across seven funds spanning local-currency debt, renewable energy, agriculture, and early-stage venture. Clemens makes the case that the barrier to institutional capital in Africa was never risk-return — it's deal size, compliance burden across 54 fragmented jurisdictions, and the absence of intermediary infrastructure. He explains why local-currency lending, co-investment with domestic pension funds and insurers, and patient first-mover capital are the mechanisms that actually move a market from unbankable to bankable. Today that platform runs around 150 to 160 individual investments across the continent. If you work in frontier market investing, climate finance, or blended finance structuring, this is a practitioner's case for what “honest,” evidence-led impact investing looks like on the ground — including where Clemens thinks the industry still overstates its own case. Featured Guest: Clemens Calice, CEO | Cygnum Capital Group Ltd Listen Next: Conversation with Nick O’Donohoe - Accidental Father of Impact: Nick O’Donohoe on Leading BSC, BII & Building Investability in the Emerging Markets (106) Discover More from SRI360°: Explore all episodes of the SRI360° Podcast Sign up for the free weekly email update Key Takeaways: • A platform running around 150 to 160 individual investments across the continent — a scale most institutional investors don't associate with Africa-focused funds. • A local-currency bond fund with $600M deployed over 11 years and a ~1% cumulative loss rate — in markets rated extremely weak from a credit perspective. • Why the real barrier to African institutional capital is deal size and compliance burden across 54 jurisdictions, not risk-return. • How the 20/20/60 blended-finance capital stack actually works, deal by deal. • Why Clemens rejects the term “impact investor” in favor of “responsible investor,” and what “honest impact investing” means in practice. • The Copperbelt Energy bond: from 178% oversubscribed on its first tranche to 238% on its second. • Why gas is, in his view, sometimes a necessity for grid stability — and where he draws the line. Here's what you're in for: 00:00 – Cold Open — Leaving Goldman in 2009: Starting a Firm with No Business Plan 02:56 – Lion's Head: Origins, Name & the South African Connection 06:23 – Emerging Markets as the Only Skill & the Tanzania Farm Detour 10:54 – 200 Chickens in Nairobi: Understanding the Smallholder Farmer 16:03 – Growing Up in Vienna, ETH Zurich & Into Banking by Accident 19:12 – Asian Crisis, INSEAD, New York & Goldman Sachs 22:03 – Cygnum Today: $1.5B AUM, Seven Funds & Four Continents 24:23 – Asset Management & Investment Banking: How the Two Sides Feed Each Other 25:45 – Investor Base & Crowding In Private Capital 28:09 – Rejecting "Theory of Change" for "Responsible Investor" 31:13 – The African Local Currency Bond Fund & KfW Partnership 29:07 – Why Local Currency: Eliminating Systemic Risk & a 1% Loss Rate Over 11 Years 42:58 – Blended Finance Demystified: The 20/20/60 Capital Stack 48:42 – African Risk Premiums & Why Private Capital Hasn't Arbitraged the Gap 52:36 – Cygnum as Intermediary: Removing Non-Financial Barriers to Scale 54:16 – Africa Go Green Fund: Energy Efficiency as the Underfunded Opportunity 57:24 – Clean Cooking, E-Mobility & Green Buildings: What's Scaling & What's Not 01:00:19 – Going First: Telecom Towers, CrossBoundary Energy & the Copperbelt Bond 01:05:51 – African Infrastructure Risk: Perception vs. Data Reality 01:07:52 – Honest Impact Investing & the "Responsible Investor" Label 01:11:12 – Gas, Baseload & the Case for African Economic Sovereignty 01:16:05 – The Lion's Head Split & the Rebrand to Cygnum 01:18:56 – Platform Growth: 20–25% Annually & What Has to Change 01:21:28 – Pre-Roll Clips & Rapid Fire 01:26:09 – Closing & How to Connect with Cygnum Capital
Sign up for the free weekly email update: https://sri360.com/newsletter/ Visit the SRI360° PODCAST: https://sri360.com/podcast/ Visit the SRI360° WEBSITE: https://sri360.com/ Follow SRI360° on X: https://twitter.com/SRI360Growth/ Follow SRI360° on FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/SRI360Growth/ | |||
| China Makes 70% of the World's Vitamins: The Fermentation Edge Hiding in Idle Factories | Matilda Ho, Bits x Bites (#140) | 23 Jul 2026 | 01:41:22 | |
Matilda Ho was banned from the kitchen for the first 25 years of her life. Her mother’s rule was simple: cooking is what you do when you fail at school. She now runs China’s first food tech venture fund. I’m joined by Matilda Ho, Founder and Managing Director of Bits x Bites — a $100 million fund vintaged in October 2020, 15 companies backed, Series A and B, and a board seat as a condition of every check. Her LPs are sovereign funds from Singapore, the Middle East and China, agrifood strategics, and family offices. Her argument is that the food system cannot be fixed at the checkout. She spent five years at BCG and IDEO advising food companies, and one project — working out how likely a Chinese meat processor was to have another scandal — turned up roughly half a million food safety incidents a year. She built an online grocery to fix it one shopper at a time, then concluded that would take longer than her lifetime. The leverage was upstream. What she found upstream is a manufacturing advantage most investors outside China have not priced. Seventy percent of the world’s vitamins, two-thirds of its amino acids and more than 80% of its stevia are already made there — much of it in brownfield plants with fermentation tanks sitting idle. Where European biotech founders cannot fund scale-up, she can buy it cheap. She is equally blunt about what does not work. Beyond Burger’s peas travel from Canada to Suzhou to California, and the margin never survives the trip. China already has tofu — clean, plant-based and 2,000 years old. So she funds certainty over moonshots: functional ingredients, animal health, matcha. And in a market where government money is now the largest source of innovation capital, her first exit was a stake sold to a provincial government vehicle. In this episode we discuss:
Featured guest:
Listen Next: AgTech Profits Meet Planet: Where Climate Impact and VC Returns Align Discover More from SRI360°:
Key Takeaways:
Matilda Ho LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matildaho/ Bits x Bites LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bits-x-bites Matilda Ho on X: @matildajyho Bits x Bites: https://bitsxbites.com/ Matilda Ho’s TED profile: https://www.ted.com/speakers/matilda_ho Related SRI360° Episodes: Beyond the 2/20 Model: Disrupting VC & 25% IRR from Climate Adaptation in Southeast Asia | |||
| Too Big for Venture, Too Small for PE: Inside the ‘Missing Middle’ Where the Alpha Hides | Sanjeev Krishnan, S2G Investments (#139) | 15 Jul 2026 | 01:27:07 | |
Sanjeev Krishnan spent thirty years arriving at one conclusion: the clean economy's binding constraint isn't technology, it's capital structure. He watched brilliant technologies, brilliant people and brilliant visions get broken on the wheel of misaligned capital — not because the science failed, but because the financing never fit what they were trying to build. That gap is the heart of this episode of SRI360. His core belief is simple: the thing holding back the clean economy is not technology. It is capital structure. Get the financing right, and the building can follow. I’m joined by Sanjeev Krishnan, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of S2G Investments, a nearly $3 billion platform across eight funds, investing at the seams of food, energy, and ocean systems. S2G has backed more than 120 companies. Sanjeev has spent his whole career on one question: how do you change an economic system using markets? Sanjeev was born in Bangalore in pre-liberalization India and moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, at age nine — his first time ever on a plane. He studied development economics, transferred to the London School of Economics, and joined JPMorgan just in time to watch the dot-com boom collapse from the inside. His team in Europe went from 120 people to 15. He was one of the 15 who kept their job. What came next taught him how capital really works in the physical world: building mobile networks across Africa, cutting the cost of a Hepatitis B vaccine by roughly 80–90% at the World Bank’s IFC, and five hard years inside “clean tech 1.0,” watching good companies fail for reasons that had nothing to do with their technology. In 2014, he co-founded S2G with Lukas Walton. Today Sanjeev invests at the seams — the gaps between asset classes and between sectors that most investors overlook. In this conversation we cover why capital structure is the real constraint, how he thinks about the wave of AI and energy demand, and why he is betting on the oceans, the part of the planet we have barely measured. In this episode we discuss:
Featured guest:
Listen Next: AgTech Profits Meet Planet: Where Climate Impact and VC Returns Align Discover More from SRI360°:
Key Takeaways:
Sanjeev Krishnan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjeev-krishnan-0b1148/ Sanjeev Krishnan at S2G: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/team/sanjeev-krishnan S2G Investments: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/ S2G “Financing Reality” report: https://www.s2ginvestments.com/insights/report-financing-reality Builders Vision: https://www.buildersvision.com/ Connect with SRI360°: Sign up for the free weekly email update: https://sri360.com/newsletter/ Visit the SRI360° PODCAST: https://sri360.com/podcast/ Visit the SRI360° WEBSITE: https://sri360.com/ Follow SRI360° on X: https://twitter.com/SRI360Growth/ Follow SRI360° on FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/SRI360Growth/ | |||
| Good Deals Don't Make Good Markets: Why Impact Investing Needs More Than Capital | Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen, GSG Impact (#138) | 09 Jul 2026 | 01:01:14 | |
In this episode, Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen traces a career that begins in the corridors of Washington political power and ends up in Khartoum during a military coup, and later in refugee camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border — before running through twenty years at the Inter-American Development Bank, the UNDP's SDG Impact Standards, and the US Development Finance Corporation under the Biden administration. She breaks down what everyone gets wrong about impact investing — that it's about a transaction, a fund, a project, when it's really about building a system — and makes the case for why GSG Impact's model of locally-rooted national partners, domestic capital mobilisation, and the forthcoming Impact Economy Index represents a fundamentally different approach to the problem. If you work in impact investing, blended finance, or development policy — or if you want to understand how a $5 trillion SME finance gap in emerging markets actually gets closed — don't miss Elizabeth's practitioner case for why good deals do not automatically create good markets. Featured Guest: Listen Next: Discover More from SRI360°:
01:02 – Scott's Introduction & Guest Framing 03:22 – Welcome & Introduction 03:30 – Three Generations: The Boggs Family & Early Lessons in Catalytic Capital 06:53 – Women Who Built Careers & Choosing International Development 08:01 – Georgetown, Madeleine Albright & Joining the UN 10:10 – First Posting: Khartoum, Sudan & the Power of Local 14:05 – Joining the IDB: Microfinance, OMJ & 20 Years of Lessons 21:20 – The Parachute Problem: What Development Finance Gets Wrong 23:25 – UNDP: Building the SDG Impact Standards 27:15 – The DFC: Policy Team Under Biden 28:25 – Joining GSG Impact: Field Builders for the Impact Economy 32:10 – Impact Economies vs. Impact Investments: The Core Thesis 34:15 – Priority 1: National Partnerships & the Ghana Case Study 36:20 – Priority 2: Impact Transparency & Frameworks Proliferation 41:20 – Does Impact Investing Outperform? The Growth Data 42:35 – Priority 3: $800M SME Finance Target & the Impact Economy Index 47:30 – Index Launch, Guardrails & the Race to the Top 49:15 – Geopolitical Reset: ODA Down 25%, USAID Gone, UK Aid Cut 53:05 – China: Avoided or Engaged? 55:25 – Rapid Fire 59:30 – Closing & How to Connect with GSG Impact Connect with SRI360°: Sign up for the free weekly email update: https://sri360.com/newsletter/ Visit the SRI360° PODCAST: https://sri360.com/podcast/ Visit the SRI360° WEBSITE: https://sri360.com/ Follow SRI360° on X: https://twitter.com/SRI360Growth/ Follow SRI360° on FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/SRI360Growth/ | |||
| 95% of Emissions, 14% of the Capital: The Bond Market Mispricing in Plain Sight | Elizabeth Alm, Saturna Capital (#137) | 01 Jul 2026 | 01:26:00 | |
Most people think a green or sustainable label on a bond means it is good for the planet. Often, it does not. A label only tells you what the issuer says it will do with the money. It does not prove that real change happens on the ground. That gap is the heart of this episode of SRI360. I'm joined by Elizabeth Alm, Senior Investment Analyst and Portfolio Manager at Saturna Capital, the oldest and largest Sharia asset manager in the United States. Elizabeth helps run the firm's global sustainable bond fund and its Islamic income fund. Her core belief is simple: that bonds play a central role in financing the transition to a cleaner economy. Elizabeth did not take the usual path into finance. She studied economics and anthropology at NYU and once dreamed of becoming an archaeologist. It took her 50 interviews to land her first job. She opened Excel for the first time on her first day of work, and her first week on a trading desk was the week Bear Stearns collapsed in 2008. Eleven years at Wells Fargo followed, working in municipal bonds as climate risk slowly began to show up in credit. Today she puts less weight on third-party ESG scores and looks for what she calls “climate alpha” — value the market has not priced in yet. In this conversation we cover how sukuk (Islamic bonds) work, why investors who are not Muslim are buying them, and what she learned on a month-long research trip across the Middle East that ended just five days before the Israel-US-Iran war broke out. In this episode we discuss:
Featured guest:
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| From Goldman Sachs to Excel Hell: Measuring Sustainability That ESG Ratings Miss | Samantha Duncan, Net Purpose (#136) | 24 Jun 2026 | 01:32:19 | |
Most investors assume an ESG rating tells them how sustainable a company is. It doesn’t. An ESG rating measures the financial risk environmental, social, and governance factors pose to the company — not the company’s actual impact on people and the planet. That distinction sits at the center of this episode of SRI360. I’m joined by Samantha Duncan, Founder and CEO of Net Purpose, a data platform now supporting clients managing approximately twenty trillion dollars in assets and built to measure what ESG ratings don't. Samantha's story starts at Goldman Sachs, where she worked on healthcare M&A through the 2008 financial crisis, watching transactions that changed the cost of pathology and shut down rural medical centres get evaluated on one metric and one metric only: earnings per share. Reading about Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank at the height of that disconnect was the thing that finally pulled her toward the door — and in 2009 she resigned and moved to Trujillo, Peru, to run a microfinance program for a children's NGO — an experience that taught her, counterintuitively, that charging the women she worked with commercial interest rates was more empowering than giving them aid on charitable terms. From there she joined LeapFrog Investments as Head of Impact, building one of the industry’s first rigorous frameworks for measuring social and financial performance together. It was there, buried in spreadsheets manually extracting numbers from PDFs, that she hit what she now calls “Excel hell” — the realization that the industry lacked the data infrastructure to make its sustainability commitments real. That realization became Net Purpose, founded in 2019 to do for sustainability data what Bloomberg and FactSet did for financial data. In this episode we discuss: • Why ESG ratings measure financial risk to the company, not the company's impact on the world • How Net Purpose calculates the percentage of a company's revenue that is genuinely sustainable • What it means that only 16% of a global index is truly sustainable — and why the other 84% is a financial risk problem, not just a moral one • The October 2025 acquisition of the SDI Asset Owner Platform, co-founded by APG, PGGM, AustralianSuper, and BCI • Why sustainability, impact, and ESG still need clearer shared definitions • What it will take for impact measurement to become as mainstream as profit Featured guest:
• Tamer El-Raghy — Acumen ARAF: Investing for Impact in Frontier Markets: https://sri360.com/podcast/tamer-el-raghy/?utm_source=episode&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=136 Discover More from SRI360°:
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| From Apartheid to the BRICS Bank to BII: Leslie Maasdorp’s Journey Through Development Finance (#135) | 18 Jun 2026 | 01:32:38 | |
🌎 Get the latest updates on Sustainable & Responsible Investing at: https://sri360.com/newsletter/ What does it take to build a multilateral development bank from scratch — and then lead one of the world's oldest DFIs through a structural reset of the entire development finance system? In this episode, Leslie Maasdorp traces a career that begins in a South African prison cell and runs through Nelson Mandela's government, Goldman Sachs International, and thirteen years in global investment banking, before arriving at the founding team of the New Development Bank in Shanghai — where he spent nine years building a $40–45 billion balance sheet institution with a AA+ credit rating from S&P and Fitch. He breaks down how BII's newly launched 2026–2031 strategy is designed to crowd in pension funds, insurers, and sovereign wealth capital at scale — and why perceived default risk in emerging markets is systematically overstated relative to actual performance. If you work in institutional capital allocation, blended finance, or emerging market infrastructure, don't miss Leslie's practitioner case for why the donor-recipient model is broken and what the next architecture of development finance needs to look like. Featured guest:
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Here’s what you’re in for: 01:06 – Guest Introduction & Scott's Framing 03:09 – Goldman Sachs & Early Investment Banking Career 06:58 – Lessons from the 2008 Financial Crisis 08:15 – Building the New Development Bank in Shanghai 11:24 – NDB: Mission, Structure & AA+ Credit Rating 16:07 – Personal Life, Covid & Russia-Ukraine at NDB 19:40 – Arrested Under Apartheid: Detention Without Trial 21:59 – Prison, Solitude & Graduating with Distinction 25:08 – Growing Up in Bethelsdorp & the Road to Activism 32:15 – Trade Unions, London Scholarship & Joining the ANC 38:53 – Building Post-Apartheid South Africa 44:42 – Joining BII: The World's Oldest DFI 46:51 – What BII Does & How It Deploys Capital 53:31 – BII's Mandate to Experiment & the Case for Reform 57:17 – BII's 2026–2031 Strategy: Mobilizing Private Capital 01:02:22 – First-Loss Structures & the Allianz ACE Fund 01:05:53 – Inside the Investment Machine: Growth, Catalyst & Kinetic 01:09:17 – Risk, Returns & Crowding In UK Pension Capital 01:15:11 – Climate Finance: The Ayana Case Study 01:17:22 – Mission 300: Electrifying Africa by 2030 01:20:13 – Growth Investment Partners Zambia & BII's Entrepreneurial Model 01:24:56 – The Big Picture: $2.4T Climate Gap 01:26:48 – Rapid Fire 01:29:44 – Closing & How to Connect with BII
Sign up for the free weekly email update: https://sri360.com/newsletter/ Visit the SRI360° PODCAST: https://sri360.com/podcast/ Visit the SRI360° WEBSITE: https://sri360.com/ Follow SRI360° on X: https://twitter.com/SRI360Growth/ Follow SRI360° on FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/SRI360Growth/ | |||
| Africa’s Unbanked: Where FinTech Is Finding the Most Resilient Returns | Mohamed Okasha, DisrupTech Ventures (#134) | 20 May 2026 | 01:39:48 | |
What does it take to build a billion-dollar fintech company and then walk away from it to start over during a global pandemic? In this episode, Mohamed Okasha shares the story behind helping to build Fawry into Egypt’s first tech unicorn—and then leaving shortly after its landmark IPO to launch DisrupTech, a first-time venture capital fund during COVID-19. He breaks down what matters more than big ideas and what is often the ultimate competitive advantage in Africa’s startup ecosystem. If you're curious about what helps founders grow stronger companies, don’t miss Mohamed’s practical lessons on investing, leadership, and decision-making from both an operator and investor perspective. Tune in to learn more about:
Resources:
Connect with SRI360°: Scott Arnell’s Book: Sustainable & Responsible Investing 360 | |||
| VC for Learning: How Outcome Funds Are Transforming Education in Emerging Markets with Amel Karboul (#133) | 06 May 2026 | 01:43:13 | |
Impact investing is entering a more disciplined, outcomes-driven phase, and it’s more complex than it first appears. In this episode of Sustainable & Responsible Investing 360, I sit down with Amel Karboul, Founder and CEO of the Education Outcomes Fund, to explore how capital can be tied directly to measurable results. Drawing on her experience working with governments, philanthropies, and impact investors, Amel explains why traditional funding models often fail to deliver real impact, and how outcomes-based financing aims to realign incentives across the system. Rather than paying for activities, this model pays for results, introducing both greater accountability and new challenges. We explore the tensions at the heart of this approach, from balancing different stakeholder expectations to addressing concerns around investor returns in low-income markets. We also discuss the risk of narrowing impact to what can be measured, and how thoughtful design can mitigate those trade-offs. Looking ahead, we examine what it will take for outcomes-based models to scale, from simplification and standardization to the potential emergence of more tradable forms of impact. Connect with SRI360°: Scott Arnell’s Book: Sustainable & Responsible Investing 360 Amel Karboul on LinkedIn Education Outcome Fund Website | |||
| Impact Investing in 2026: What Survives, What Scales, and What Changes with Eric Rice (#132) | 24 Apr 2026 | 01:10:51 | |
Impact investing is entering a new phase, and it’s more nuanced than the headlines suggest. In this episode of Sustainable & Responsible Investing 360, I sit down with returning guest Eric Rice for his third appearance to unpack what’s really happening across global markets. Drawing on his experience at Wellington Management and BlackRock, and now in private markets with SEAF (Small Enterprise Assistance Funds), Eric explains why this moment reflects divergence rather than decline. While the US has stepped back from ESG language, Europe, Japan, and other regions are accelerating capital deployment and regulatory support. We explore the limits of impact capital in replacing development aid, especially in the wake of shifts at USAID, and why commercial discipline remains central to the model. We also discuss the growing role of pension funds, the expansion of investable opportunities, and the shift toward financial materiality. Looking ahead, we turn to climate adaptation and resilience as emerging areas of focus, offering opportunity, but still evolving in terms of scale and structure. Connect with SRI360°: Eric Rice Episode 009: https://sri360.com/podcast/eric-rice/ Eric Rice Episode 088: https://sri360.com/podcast/eric-rice-2/ Scott Arnell’s Book: Sustainable & Responsible Investing 360 | |||
| Storage Enables, VC Proves, Science Validates: The Full Case for Climate Investing (#131) | 15 Apr 2026 | 01:28:40 | |
What does climate investing look like when it actually delivers returns? In this special compilation episode of Sustainable & Responsible Investing 360, I bring together three investors approaching the climate opportunity from very different angles, yet arriving at a similar conclusion. First, Ben Guest of Gresham House explains why battery energy storage is the missing piece of the renewable energy transition. As intermittent power sources like wind and solar scale, storage becomes essential to balancing the grid, and a compelling infrastructure investment with double-digit return potential. Next, Nancy Pfund, founder of DBL Partners, shares over two decades of experience in what she calls “double bottom line” investing. As an early backer of companies like Tesla, she demonstrates that incorporating environmental and social considerations doesn’t dilute returns; it can enhance them by expanding the opportunity set. Finally, Lena Thiede of Planet A Ventures introduces a more rigorous approach to impact. With an in-house science team conducting lifecycle assessments on every investment, her firm ensures that climate impact is not just intended, but measurable, and tied directly to performance. Three perspectives across infrastructure, venture capital, and science. Connect with SRI360°: Ben Guest full episode: https://sri360.com/podcast/ben-guest/ Nancy Pfund full episode: https://sri360.com/podcast/nancy-pfund/ Lena Thiede full episode: https://sri360.com/podcast/lena-thiede/ Scott Arnell’s Book: Sustainable & Responsible Investing 360 | |||
| The Catalytic Capital Playbook: How £10M Unlocked £2B in Private Investment | 07 Apr 2026 | 01:06:12 | |
What if the real constraint in impact investing isn’t a lack of capital… but how that capital is structured? This is a compilation episode built from three conversations, each tackling a different part of the same question. What is catalytic capital? How do you create the conditions for it? And what happens when you deploy it at scale? You’ll hear from Yasemin Saltuk Lamy, Head of Investment Strategy at Legal & General, who helped define impact investing during her time at J.P. Morgan and later led the Catalyst portfolio at British International Investment. She breaks down catalytic capital as capital that steps into spaces others won’t, and explains how structuring it as junior or first-loss capital can transform “too risky” opportunities into investment-grade assets for institutional investors. From Stephen Muers, CEO of Better Society Capital, who shares how the UK built the infrastructure to support this kind of investing. Drawing on a unique funding model that includes dormant bank accounts and private bank capital, he explains how catalytic capital can be used to grow entire markets, not just individual portfolios, and why the UK’s social impact investment market has expanded more than 12-fold. And from Michele Giddens, Co-Founder and CEO of Bridges Fund Management, who shows what execution looks like in practice. Starting with a £40 million fund anchored by £10 million of government catalytic capital, Bridges has gone on to mobilize over £2 billion in private investment while delivering competitive, often double-digit returns. If you’re thinking about how capital can be deployed more intentionally, whether as an investor, policymaker, or operator, this episode offers a clear and practical lens into how catalytic capital works, and why it matters. Connect with SRI360°: | |||
| In Case You Missed It: Must-Hear Conversations Shaping Impact in 2026 | 26 Mar 2026 | 01:21:11 | |
Over the past several weeks, I have had the opportunity to speak with four leaders working at the intersection of capital, climate, and system-level change, each bringing a distinct perspective on what it takes to move from intention to real-world impact. Across these conversations, we explored everything from outcomes-based financing and government-backed impact models to regenerative finance and ownership structures, to early-stage climate investing in Southeast Asia. What connects them is a shared recognition that the current system, whether ESG frameworks, traditional venture capital, or public spending models, isn’t quite delivering on its promise. Here are the guests featured in the episode: Francisco “Chico” Jardim, General Partner at SP Ventures We talked about how this model has scaled globally, why it works best in complex social challenges like homelessness and criminal justice, and what still needs to happen to move from pilots to true system-wide adoption. Chico also shared his perspective on impact transparency and why better data and accountability are critical to unlocking larger pools of capital. Full episode: https://sri360.com/podcast/francisco-jardim/ Nick Hurd, Chair & Senior Adviser, GSG Impact Nick brings a deeply critical lens to traditional ESG and even parts of the impact investing ecosystem. His core argument is simple but uncomfortable: doing “less harm” isn’t the same as creating meaningful positive change. Full episode: https://sri360.com/podcast/nick-hurd/ Laura Ortiz Montemayor, Founding Partner at SVX Mexico & Managing Partner, Regenera Venture Fund Laura is focused on one of the most underfunded areas in climate investing: adaptation. While most capital continues to flow toward mitigation, she’s working to back founders building solutions for the climate impacts that are already here. Full episode: https://sri360.com/podcast/laura-ortiz-montemayor/ Alina Truhina, Founding and Managing Partner at Utopia Capital Management Throughout these conversations, Alina plays a critical role in connecting the dots, probing where ideas hold up, where they fall short, and how they translate into real-world investment decisions. Alina shares insights about climate adaptation, impact investing, and how venture capital often struggles to understand and engage with regions where climate risk is already part of everyday life. Full episode: https://sri360.com/podcast/alina-truhina/ Taken together, these four perspectives offer a window into a field in transition, one that’s moving beyond labels and frameworks toward deeper questions of structure, accountability, and long-term impact. | |||
| AgTech Profits Meet Planet: Where Climate Impact and VC Returns Align | Sarah Nolet, Tenacious Ventures | 18 Mar 2026 | 01:33:23 | |
In climate investing, credibility is often associated with breakthrough technologies or large-scale energy infrastructure. This episode challenges that assumption by asking a different question: what if some of the most compelling climate investment opportunities lie within the everyday realities of farming? My guest this week is Sarah Nolet, Co-Founder and General Partner at Tenacious Ventures. With a background that spans systems engineering, hands-on farming experience, and venture capital, Sarah now leads an investment firm focused on building climate resilience across global agri-food systems. In our conversation on Sustainable & Responsible Investing 360, Sarah explains why traditional venture capital models often struggle in agriculture, and why solutions must be designed around the physical constraints farmers face every day. We also discuss:
The conversation reframes climate-smart agriculture as a pragmatic investment opportunity, one where improving farmer economics can drive both measurable climate outcomes and competitive venture returns.
Sarah Nolet, Co-Founder and General Partner, Tenacious Ventures Episode Resources: Connect with SRI360°:
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| From Mud Huts to Brick Houses: Venture Capital & Climate Resilience in Africa | 11 Mar 2026 | 01:26:51 | |
Climate finance conversations often focus on mitigation. However, the question Tamer El-Raghy raises is more structural: what if one of the most compelling climate investment opportunities lies in helping smallholder farmers adapt? In this episode of Sustainable & Responsible Investing 360, I’m joined by Tamer El-Raghy, Managing Director of the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund (ARAF). Tamer leads one of the first investment vehicles dedicated to climate adaptation in agriculture across Africa, backing early-stage companies that help farmers improve productivity, stability, and resilience in the face of changing climate conditions. We discuss why agriculture remains chronically undercapitalised despite its central role in global food systems, and how blended finance structures, including first-loss capital from development institutions, can unlock mainstream investment into frontier markets. Tamer also explains why successful agribusiness models often function as platform businesses, bundling financing, inputs, technical support, and market access to solve multiple farmer constraints at once. What stayed with me is the simplicity of his impact lens: when farmers move from mud huts to brick houses, it signals something deeper than income growth. It reflects stability, dignity, and the foundations of long-term resilience. Connect with SRI360°:
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| Alpha Strategy: Eliminating Bias to Unlock 4X Venture Outperformance | 05 Mar 2026 | 01:42:32 | |
In venture capital, credibility is often framed around access, networks, and pattern recognition. This episode challenges that foundation by asking a harder question: what if the industry’s biggest blind spot is also its most persistent source of mispriced opportunity? My guest this week is Sharon Vosmek, CEO and Managing Partner of Astia. With more than two decades of early-stage investing experience, Sharon has built one of the most structured bias-mitigation processes in venture through Astia’s Expert SIFT methodology. A documented and disciplined system designed to eliminate individual, network, and process bias from investment decisions. Sharon explains why the gender gap in venture funding is better understood as a market inefficiency, and how removing warm-introduction gatekeeping meaningfully expands high-quality deal flow. We also discuss:
This conversation examines inclusive investing not as concessionary capital, but as a rigorous venture discipline designed to capture overlooked alpha. Featured Guest Episode Resources:
Connect with SRI360°:
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| Scaling Impact & Alpha: Inside T. Rowe Price’s Myth-Busting Impact Fixed-Income Strategies | Matt Lawton | 26 Feb 2026 | 01:39:02 | |
In fixed income, credibility is tested differently, and real world metrics like liquidity, scale, and benchmark scrutiny leave little room for storytelling. This episode examines how impact strategies can operate inside mainstream credit markets without weakening financial discipline or diluting measurable outcomes.
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| Beyond the 2/20 Model: Disrupting VC & 25% IRR from Climate Adaptation in Southeast Asia | 17 Feb 2026 | 01:23:33 | |
Most climate investment still flows toward mitigation, technologies designed to reduce future emissions. Far less capital is directed toward climate adaptation, despite the fact that many regions are already living with the physical, economic, and social consequences of climate change. This imbalance is especially visible in emerging markets, where climate risk, rapid economic growth, and limited institutional infrastructure collide. In this episode of SRI360, I’m joined by Alina Truhina, Founder and Managing Partner of Radical Fund and Utopia Capital Management. Alina has spent her career building and backing early-stage companies across Southeast Asia and Africa, with a focus on climate adaptation, venture capital, and how businesses actually get built in emerging markets. We discuss why traditional venture capital models often fail in emerging markets, why climate adaptation is harder to measure (but no less urgent) than mitigation, and why supporting founders in these environments requires far more than simply writing a check. Tune in to learn more about:
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| Regenerative Finance and Biodiversity: The Risk Investors Keep Mispricing | 05 Feb 2026 | 02:17:38 | |
What happens when sustainability strategies fail to address real climate risk and long-term investment outcomes? In this episode of SRI360, I am speaking with Laura Ortiz Montemayor about impact investing, climate risk, and regenerative finance, and why sustainability alone may no longer be enough for investors focused on long-term value creation. Drawing from Laura’s experience in traditional finance and her work building regenerative investment strategies in Latin America, the conversation explores how capital allocation shapes systems, and why rethinking how capital is deployed matters as much as where it flows. The conversation is especially relevant for investors navigating climate finance, nature risk, and sustainable investing in emerging markets. We talk about:
Featured guest:
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| Alpha From Inertia: How Paying for Outcomes Unlocks Impact Investing Returns | 21 Jan 2026 | 01:31:06 | |
The biggest risk investors face right now isn’t just climate change, geopolitics, or emerging-market volatility. The real threat in impact investing is inertia. Capital stays in familiar places because big asset owners can get satisfactory returns elsewhere. So, unless incentives and information change, inertia wins. This episode is about why social investment keeps getting stuck, even when good people across government, finance, and communities are trying to do the right thing – and what actually has to change for money to start moving. It focuses on where incentives misfire and how to scale impact investing and social investment beyond pilot projects. I’m joined by Nick Hurd, former UK minister and now Chair of GSG Impact. Nick has worked across government, finance, and civil society. He helped build the UK’s social investment market, pioneered early social impact bonds, and later stepped away from politics after deciding markets offered more leverage than ministries. We talk about:
Featured guest:
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| How AgTech Venture Capital Harvests Alpha and Impact in Latin America | 15 Jan 2026 | 02:04:45 | |
Agrifood and AgTech investing in Latin America is still widely misunderstood. That gap between perception and reality is creating real opportunity for patient, specialized investors who understand agriculture as a long-term operating business, not a short-cycle investment theme. Volatility here is often mistaken for weakness. But as this conversation makes clear, agribusiness has kept growing through recessions, pandemics, and political transitions. In many cases, it’s been one of the most resilient parts of the economy. I’m joined by Francisco Jardim, General Partner at SP Ventures. He’s spent nearly two decades building one of the region’s earliest agrifood venture capital platforms, investing across agriculture innovation, climate resilience, and food security in Brazil and across Latin America. We talk about:
Tune in to hear why Latin American agrifood and climate tech may be one of the most compelling risk-return opportunities of this generation. Featured guest:
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| How Catalytic Capital Turns High-Risk Assets Into Pension-Grade Investments | 06 Jan 2026 | 00:42:48 | |
Catalytic capital is often described as concessional capital, sometimes accepting lower returns. But this framing overlooks what matters most. In practice, catalytic capital steps in first, absorbs the risk others can’t, and makes institutional capital comfortable enough to follow. If you’re involved in capital allocation, this matters because catalytic capital isn’t about charity. It’s about structuring risk so institutions can invest in assets they normally couldn’t because of regulatory and rating rules. This episode focuses on how catalytic capital functions inside impact investing portfolios under real regulatory and balance-sheet constraints. It revisits key points from my earlier conversation with Yasemin Saltuk Lamy who built and scaled the Catalyst Portfolio at British International Investment from roughly £300 million to about £1.6 billion. Tune in to learn:
Featured guest:
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| Why Sustainable Forestry Beats Traditional Timber Models on Risk and Returns | 30 Dec 2025 | 01:05:58 | |
Forestry is often treated as just timber production. But in this 2-in-1 compilation about sustainable forestry, you’ll hear a different way of thinking. One that looks beyond timber to carbon, biodiversity, water, and resilience. I revisit key moments from two earlier episodes that look at sustainable forestry as a serious investment strategy and a practical example of nature-based investing. They show how forests can deliver competitive returns, hedge inflation, and reduce portfolio risk while addressing climate and biodiversity pressures. In one conversation, Bettina von Hagen talks about how better forest management can make forests more valuable over time. In the other, Charlotte Kaiser explains why climate and biodiversity loss are now showing up as real risks for investors. Together, they show how decisions made on the ground connect with institutional capital in the real world. You’ll hear:
If you want solid information before deciding whether forests belong in a portfolio, this episode is a good place to start. Featured guests:
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| Circular Economy Investing: VC Returns from Fashion’s Broken Logistics | 23 Dec 2025 | 01:04:11 | |
The apparel industry is a $3 trillion market. But a massive share of what it produces goes straight to waste. That combination points to mispriced inputs and broken systems. And to real opportunities for circular economy solutions that work on both the business side and the environmental side. In this end-of-year gift to listeners, I'm revisiting a conversation that shows where to look for investment opportunity: at overproduction, reverse logistics that don’t work, and at a system where brands often find it cheaper to write off returned product than resell it. These are highlights from an earlier conversation with Karla Mora, founder of Alante Capital, an early-stage venture fund focused on circular economy solutions and sustainable supply chains across the apparel industry. Karla works directly with brands, manufacturers, and material innovators to understand where waste is created and where capital can change outcomes. You’ll hear:
Listen in. — Featured guest:
— Listen Next:
— Discover More from SRI360°:
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| Green Bonds 101: Two Women Who Built the Market from Scratch | 16 Dec 2025 | 01:04:55 | |
Green bonds sound simple until you try to separate the real ones from the 50 shades of green flooding today’s market. This episode offers an insider framework to distinguish credible green bonds from greenwashing, understand what real additionality looks like in fixed income, and make more confident capital-allocation decisions in a label-driven market. It revisits early conversations with Marilyn Ceci and Romina Reversi, leaders who helped build the green bond market before sustainable finance went mainstream. Both worked inside JP Morgan as issuers, investors, and regulators were still defining standards, reporting, and impact measurement. You’ll hear how green bonds evolved from a niche experiment into a scalable fixed-income market, and what that evolution reveals about transparency, liquidity, and investor trust today. This episode explores:
— Featured guests:
— Listen Next:
— Discover More from SRI360°:
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| How Blended Finance Powers 8% IRR in Emerging Market Utilities | 09 Dec 2025 | 01:22:16 | |
Blended finance is making hard deals in emerging markets investable. It drives real infrastructure development where capital markets are thin. And when the work involves emergency aid and building businesses, you need someone who’s seen how money really works in emerging markets. Few people know how to make those pieces fit together better than my guest today. Talmage Payne has spent three decades proving that mission-first investing can deliver both measurable social impact and competitive returns. Talmage is the founder of multiple social ventures across Southeast Asia and West Africa. He now serves as chairperson of TapEffect, a piped water utility delivering clean water to rural communities. There, households pay for the service, and the company delivers an 8-9% IRR. Today, we talk about how to blend grants, equity, and debt to scale essential services and how smart impact measurement keeps both investors and operators accountable. Join us to learn:
This is a conversation about what actually works backed by real numbers. Tune in. — Discover More from SRI360°:
— Talmage Payne LinkedIn TapEffect website | |||
| Venture Capital’s New Frontier: Why India Wins in AgriTech, Rural Fintech, & Climate Resilience | 02 Dec 2025 | 01:25:38 | |
My guest is Mark Kahn, Managing Partner at Omnivore, a $295 million venture capital firm investing in startups across agriculture, food, and the rural economy in India, focused on climate risk resilience. In this episode, we talk about how venture capital can be redesigned to fund climate adaptation in the real economy, and still deliver real returns. Mark shares what he’s learned from over a decade investing in agritech and climate adaptation in India, and why institutional investors continue to underestimate the opportunity in emerging markets. We also discuss:
Tune in to hear why India may be the most logical and overlooked bet in climate-smart venture capital. And why it's time to fund adaptation before it's too late. — Discover More from SRI360°:
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| Why Impact Must Become Finance’s Third Axis: Rethinking Returns, Risk, and Responsibility | 25 Nov 2025 | 01:49:29 | |
Richard Brandweiner, Chair of Impact Investing Australia and a longtime institutional investor, joins the show to discuss the realities of impact investing at scale. He reflects on universal ownership, system-level risks, blended finance, and what it truly takes to align capital with real-world outcomes and fiduciary expectations. Richard shares lessons from leadership roles at Perpetual, Aware Super, LeapFrog, Pendal, and Regnan, and why hope isn’t a strategy when designing investment frameworks meant to deliver measurable impact. A candid conversation for investors, asset owners, and practitioners who want an honest look at where sustainable finance is working, and where it isn’t. — Discover More from SRI360°:
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| Affordable Housing & High Returns: How RBC’s Stable-Prepay Mortgage Portfolios Deliver Alpha and Community Wealth | 18 Nov 2025 | 01:21:26 | |
In this episode, I talk with Ron Homer – Chief Strategist for Impact Investing at RBC Global Asset Management, and one of the earliest architects of community development investing in the United States. — Connect with SRI360°: — | |||
| The Contrarian Bet: Why Investing in India & Africa is "Less Risky Than Silicon Valley VC" | 11 Nov 2025 | 01:32:51 | |
My guest today is Eva Yazhari – General Partner at Beyond Capital Ventures and one of the most original thinkers in the world of impact investing. Trained on Wall Street, Eva left finance to found Beyond Capital, turning her expertise toward building impact-driven markets. Beyond Capital Fund was structured as a nonprofit, a 501(c)3 – not to do charity, but to meet the moment. She describes it as “almost like a Trojan horse” – a structure that made her approach more acceptable to early supporters, even as she operated with full VC rigor. She knew in 2009 that most investors did not yet believe emerging markets could deliver both returns and impact. So she created a structure that was more palatable – donors could get a tax deduction, while she quietly ran the fund like a VC from day one. There were no grants. No concessionary capital. They always behaved like a VC. The result was a top‑quintile track record: a 0.3% loss ratio, markups, and over 100 million people reached through portfolio companies’ products and services. But the nonprofit structure also kept the firm smaller than it needed to be. “I think it was the right thing to do, but I think it was a little bit of a mistake in the growth of the firm.” In 2019, someone approached her after a talk and simply asked, “How do we invest?” – and that was the moment she knew the market was finally ready. She and her team launched Beyond Capital Ventures, a for‑profit venture fund, carrying forward the same thesis with a structure that allowed investors to participate directly in the returns. Today, Beyond Capital Ventures invests in early-stage companies across East Africa and India. It’s one of the few woman-led impact VC firms globally, with a team that’s 70% based in the markets they invest in. Eva’s approach is hands-on, thesis-driven, and unafraid to push boundaries. She refuses deal flow from Europe or the U.S. because she believes the best opportunities come from being on the ground. As she says, “I’d rather the principal who runs our Nairobi office meet a founder while filling up his water bottle, than us meet them through some other channel.” Beyond Capital has pioneered something radical in VC: the equitable venture structure. 10% of the GP’s carry is allocated to portfolio founders. Not only does it create community – it’s created collaboration. That motivates companies across her portfolio now to share customers, talent, and capital. She measures impact as rigorously as she measures financial performance. Her team uses a three-tier framework aligned with IRIS and SDG metrics. And she’s clear-eyed about what success looks like. “Everybody is focused on sourcing better and investing better. Nobody is focused on adding value, and that is exactly where everything goes right or wrong.” Eva’s career is proof that creativity, service, and capital don’t have to be separate. And that you can build something that lasts if you’re bold enough to hold them together. Listen in. — Connect with SRI360°: — | |||
| 50 Shades of Green: The €850+ Billion Logic Behind AXA’s Investment Approach | 04 Nov 2025 | 01:18:21 | |
My guest today is Jamie Friedland, a former U.S. Treasury trader turned sustainability analyst at AXA Investment Managers – one of the world’s largest and most active players in sustainable investing. He joined AXA Investment Managers – now part of BNP Paribas Group – in March 2022. Within the group, BNP Paribas Asset Management oversees over €716 billion in assets, while the broader platform manages around €1.5 trillion globally. Approximately 90% of listed assets are classified under Article 8 or 9 of the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, meaning they integrate sustainability or have a dedicated sustainable objective (Source: BNP Paribas/ AXA Investment Managers (Core) as of end of 2024). At AXA, Jamie works in a central ESG role, focused on public investments and helping integrate sustainability across equities, fixed income, infrastructure, and alternatives. — DISCLAIMER: This communication does not constitute, on the part of AXA Investment Managers, a solicitation or investment, legal or tax advice. Due to its simplification, this document is partial, and opinions, estimates, and forecasts herein are subjective and subject to change without notice. There is no guarantee forecasts made will come to pass. Data, figures, declarations, analysis, predictions, and other information in this document is provided based on our state of knowledge at the time of creation of this document. Whilst every care is taken, no representation or warranty (including liability towards third parties), express or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability or completeness of the information contained herein. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the recipient. This material does not contain sufficient information to support an investment decision. — Connect with SRI360°: — - AXA Investment Managers website - BNP Paribas Asset Management - Point of No Returns 2025: A responsible investment benchmark of 76 of& | |||
| Double-Dividends from Nature-Risk: Using Geospatial Data to Pinpoint Hidden Alpha in Global Portfolios | 28 Oct 2025 | 01:56:22 | |
My guest today is Laura Segafredo – Chief Growth Officer at NatureAlpha, and a systems thinker who’s spent the last twenty years connecting science, policy, and capital to build tools that help finance face the realities of the climate crisis. Laura began her career as an energy economist in Europe and California, contributing to major climate policy efforts like the Paris Agreement. She then spent nearly a decade at BlackRock, where she helped transform ESG from a niche concern into a $500 billion force across fixed income and index investing. She led the creation of green bond tools, sustainability frameworks, and data standards that shaped the firm’s global strategy. But as ESG became increasingly politicized, innovation stalled, and Laura decided it was time to chart a new path. She took a leap – from the world’s largest asset manager to NatureAlpha, a small startup using geospatial data to bring nature into investing. There, she’s helping investors understand how companies depend on and impact natural systems – like water, soil, and biodiversity – and what happens when those systems start to break down. Most portfolios have never seen this data. Now they can. NatureAlpha’s core product is Geoverse 2.0 – a geospatial AI tool that analyzes 8.5 million asset locations worldwide, tagging each with indicators of ecosystem health and how much a company depends on nature. It uses a quadrant model to flag the danger zone: places where companies are highly dependent on ecosystems – like rivers, forests, or soil – that are already deteriorating. That’s where risk concentrates – high dependency, low resilience. The idea is to turn that risk into insight. Geoverse doesn’t just map individual assets – it scans entire portfolios, helping investors see exposures they’ve never seen before. Through partnerships with data providers and platforms like ICE – and collaborations across the wider investment ecosystem – NatureAlpha is working to make its nature-related insights more accessible to investors within the tools they already use. That unlocks what Laura calls the “double dividend”: portfolios that reduce nature-related risk and keep pace with market returns. Still, Laura doesn’t overpromise. If there’s one lesson she’s carried from the ESG battles, it’s this: be transparent about what you know, and even more about what you don’t. Today, she’s studying eco-theology, writing essays, and speaking to philosophers, post-growth economists, and faith leaders. My conversation with Laura goes way beyond ESG. It’s about what shifts when you zoom out from carbon and start seeing nature not as scenery, but as infrastructure. When rivers, forests, and soil stop being externalities and start showing up on the balance sheet. If you tune in, you'll also hear what made her lose faith in market-based climate solutions, what the biggest lie the industry tells itself, and why the next big revolution in investing may be a moral one. Because in the end, Laura’s not trying to build better ratings or cleaner tickers. She’s trying to build a better world – one that we might actually want to invest in. — Connect with SRI360°: — - NatureAlpha website | |||
| Sustainability 2.0: How Growth Investors Unlock Hidden ROI from ESG Metrics | 21 Oct 2025 | 01:11:13 | |
My guest is Nidhi Chadda, founder and CEO of Enzo Advisors – a female- and minority-led sustainability and climate advisory firm that helps companies and investors integrate ESG factors into strategy and performance. She’s a former Wall Street portfolio manager who believes ESG isn’t about politics – it’s about disciplined risk management and long-term value creation grounded in data. Before launching Enzo, Nidhi built a career that spanned investment banking, consulting, and asset management – always driven by a desire to understand what truly creates value in business. It all came together years later at RBC, when she encountered ESG research that reframed sustainability as a core driver of financial performance. That’s when it clicked – ESG wasn’t just about mitigating risk; it could actually drive value creation. She immediately signed up to help bring that approach into U.S. investment strategies. Her team built a scorecard of over 20 ESG factors – human capital, environmental exposure, governance – and tied them directly to outcomes like revenue growth and cost savings. It was a data-first approach that opened a new chapter. In 2020, Nidhi left a high-paying job managing billions to start her own ESG consulting firm, Enzo Advisors, a female- and minority-led sustainability consulting firm based in New York. It was a risky moment. But she knew the field was shifting. ESG was moving from a “nice to have” to a core part of operational resilience. And Enzo’s mission was to help small and mid-sized companies operationalize ESG and show them how ESG could actually make them stronger, more resilient, and more valuable over time. Nidhi calls it Sustainability 2.0 – less about saying the right thing, more about doing the right thing... and measuring it. At the center of her strategy are three things companies can actually measure:
But she doesn’t stop there. She’s also Chief Impact Officer at Richmond Global Sciences, where she helps advance RGS Rift – a data-driven platform that applies impact-weighted accounting principles to quantify a company’s environmental, customer, and employee impact in financial terms. It’s built on a concept called impact-weighted accounting, which is just a fancy way of saying: let’s measure how companies help or harm people and the planet – and translate that into real numbers. She doesn’t get sucked into the political drama around ESG. Instead, she helps companies and their boards zero in on what actually moves value. And she’s hopeful. AI is making data better. Investors are asking smarter questions. And the whole conversation is shifting – away from buzzwords, toward real business fundamentals like risk and performance. If you strip away the noise, the labels, the acronyms – what you’re left with is a simple idea: ESG, done right, is just disciplined business. Nidhi Chadda knows how to make it work in the real world – and in this episode, she shares exactly what that takes. — Connect with SRI360°: — - Enzo Advisors LLC website | |||
| Moving from IRR to IMM: Investing Based on the Impact Multiple of Money | Michael Etzel, Bridgespan | 14 Oct 2025 | 01:48:01 | |
My guest today is Michael Etzel – a partner at Bridgespan, and one of the key architects behind a shift that’s still unfolding: the effort to bring hard-nosed analytical discipline to a field once seen as closer to charity than capital. Michael came to this work from the social sector, back when “impact investing” wasn’t yet a defined field. At Bridgespan, he began advising philanthropists and foundations – and over time, that work expanded to include some of the world’s largest asset managers as they started asking how capital could solve problems philanthropy couldn’t. His idea was pretty simple: to put impact first. Our conversation starts with that principle – and where it sits between two poles. On one side: traditional philanthropy willing to lose money in service of outcomes. On the other: finance-first investing chasing market-rate returns. Impact-first lives in the messy middle. The kind where the first diligence question isn’t “What’s the IRR?” – it’s “What’s the problem we’re solving?” Michael was one of the architects of the Impact Multiple of Money, or IMM – a six-step process designed to estimate and compare the social or environmental value created for every dollar invested. It starts with what a business produces, connects those outputs to real-world outcomes, and draws on academic research to ground the analysis. The result is a dollar-based estimate of impact – not to put a price on people’s lives, but to give investors a common language for understanding what value really means. Michael breaks it down in plain terms. He and his team actually put numbers to impact – they start with what a business produces, figure out what real-world benefits come from that, adjust for the risks, and then compare it to the money invested. The IMM framework is now used across TPG’s Rise and Rise Climate funds, together managing tens of billions of dollars in assets. It’s become part of how they underwrite investments, sitting right alongside financial measures like IRR and MOIC when evaluating performance. And the best part – it’s open source. The full method and case studies are published in Harvard Business Review (“Calculating the Value of Impact Investing”), so anyone can see how the math works. But for Michael, this work has never been just about frameworks. It’s about decision-making – what actually happens inside organizations when impact moves from a good idea to something real. In this conversation, we also got into some of the bigger questions shaping the future of the field:
Tune in! *** Impact investing services are provided by Bridgespan Social Impact, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of The Bridgespan Group. – About the SRI 360° Podcast: The SRI 360° Podcast is focused exclusively on sustainable & responsible investing. — Connect with SRI360°: — - Michael Etzel Biography - Michael Etzel LinkedIn | |||
| New Return Drivers in VC: 40% IRR From Brazil’s Underserved Markets | 07 Oct 2025 | 01:37:42 | |
Return drivers in impact venture capital are changing fast. And today's guest Daniel Izzo is at the forefront of that shift.
Forget the myth that impact means sacrifice. Daniel busts it with facts. Tune in to find out how. — About the SRI 360° Podcast: The SRI 360° Podcast is focused exclusively on sustainable & responsible investing. In each episode, I interview a world-class investor who is an accomplished practitioner from all asset classes. — Discover More from SRI360°:
— - Daniel Izzo LinkedIn - The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits | |||
| Accidental Father of Impact: Nick O'Donohoe on Leading BSC, BII & Building Investability in Emerging Markets | 30 Sep 2025 | 01:34:56 | |
Blended finance is what makes the hardest deals in emerging markets investable.
If you think emerging markets are too risky, listen to someone who ran toward them. — Discover More from SRI360°:
— - British International Investment website | |||
| The Terrifying Math of Stranded Assets: Is Your Portfolio Exposed to a $100 Trillion Risk? | 23 Sep 2025 | 01:40:58 | |
Stranded assets are turning up on balance sheets everywhere. And Mark Campanale saw the climate risk before anyone else did. We discuss:
This is a conversation about financial blind spots and the tools to fix them. Listen in. — Discover More from SRI360°:
— Mark Campanale Twitter/X | |||
| Impact Investing At $28BN Scale: Scaling Sustainable Capital Across Private Markets | 16 Sep 2025 | 01:46:15 | |
In this episode, I sit down with Jonathan Hirschtritt, who helped build and now leads sustainable and impact investing at GCM Grosvenor – an alternatives-only asset manager that’s been around for more than 50 years. We also cover:
Tune in to learn how impact investing actually works inside large institutional portfolios and why private markets control investing can be such a powerful place to drive measurable outcomes. — About the SRI 360° Podcast: The SRI 360° Podcast is focused exclusively on sustainable & responsible investing. In each episode, I interview a world-class investor who is an accomplished practitioner from all asset classes. — Discover More from SRI360°:
— 🔹 GCM Grosvenor website 🔹 “Strengthening Outcomes: Impact and Financial Value at Exit,” published by ICM, Morriso | |||
| The Overlooked Venture Capital Advantage In Emerging Markets | 09 Sep 2025 | 02:23:09 | |
Venture capital looks very different when it’s built inside a humanitarian organization and deployed in emerging markets where rules are informal, capital is constrained, and systems function very differently than in developed economies. In this episode, my guest is Timothy Rann, Managing Partner of Mercy Corps Ventures. He leads what may be the only venture capital fund in the world to have been built inside a humanitarian NGO. When the fund was created, Mercy Corps was a roughly $600 million-a-year organization operating in more than 40 countries facing conflict, climate stress, or both.
This conversation strips away theory and shows what venture capital really looks like on the ground. — Discover More from SRI360°:
— 🔹 Mercy Corps Ventures LinkedIn 🔹 Timothy Rann website 🔹 Timothy Rann LinkedIn | |||
| Where Nature Meets Capital: 3 Leaders Turning Nature Into a Real Asset Class | 02 Sep 2025 | 02:02:57 | |
Most investors now accept that climate risk is financial risk. But what about nature loss? What about the fact that half of global GDP is tied to the natural world – from soil health to pollination to forest carbon – and yet almost none of that value is priced into markets? If climate was the first wake-up call, nature is the second. In this 3-in-1 compilation, we revisit past episodes with investors at the forefront of this shift. Each one is building strategies to bring natural capital into the financial mainstream – through listed equities, real assets, or nature-based carbon credits. Here are the featured guests: Martin Berg, CEO of Climate Asset Management Martin is pushing to bring natural capital out of the margins and into the financial mainstream. With over $650 million raised and three funds under management, Martin’s building a new category of real asset investing – one that spans sustainable agriculture, forestry, and nature-based carbon. The firm’s strategies include land acquisition and restoration in developed markets, as well as carbon credit partnerships with smallholder farmers in emerging markets. Each is tailored to a different type of investor – but they share the same goal: aligning financial returns with measurable improvements in natural ecosystems. Ingrid Kukuljan, Former Head of Impact & Sustainable Investing at Federated Hermes At the time of recording our original interview, Ingrid was Head of Impact and Sustainable Investing at Federated Hermes. In that role, she launched the Biodiversity Equity Strategy – the first biodiversity-themed fund in the listed equity space. Her team screened nearly 9,000 listed companies – the standard MSCI All World benchmark – and found only about 150 that qualified as biodiversity champions: businesses aligned with at least one biodiversity-linked SDG and actively working to preserve or restore nature. The gap was striking. Ingrid pointed out that 80% of the UN Sustainable Development Goals depend on biodiversity, yet fewer than 20% are on track – and in the past 50 years, we’ve decimated biodiversity globally. Her team used a detailed KPI framework across emissions, water use, land conversion, and waste, making the case that public equities can play a vital role in financing nature-positive outcomes – and in helping restore ecosystems without compromising returns. Helen Avery, Director of Nature Programmes at the Green Finance Institute (GFI) Helen is working to make nature investable. As Director of Nature Programmes at the Green Finance Institute, she leads the GFI Hive – a dedicated platform focused on removing the barriers that keep private capital from flowing into nature. That means shaping the building blocks of nature markets – like biodiversity net gain, mitigation banking, and nature-based carbon – and helping define the standards, infrastructure, and policy frameworks that make them investable at scale. Helen’s team supports the UK’s nature markets and investment readiness funds, partners with farmers and NGOs to build new business models, and works closely with corporates through the TNFD to help them assess their risks and dependencies on nature. — | |||
| How Social Bonds Are Shaping the Future of Impact Investing | 26 Aug 2025 | 01:34:25 | |
The traditional view of bonds focuses only on financial returns. But social bonds turn that model on its head by aligning capital with solutions to pressing social challenges. Social bonds link financial success directly to positive societal change. Across these 3 conversations from past guests of the SRI360 podcast, a common thread emerges. When you design investment strategies to solve real problems and hold yourself accountable for the outcomes, you can unlock new sources of alpha, resilience, and long-term value. Social impact bonds show how shifting incentives can deliver better results for both investors and society. Here are the featured guests: Sir Ronald Cohen, Co-Founder and President of GSG Impact Sir Ronald Cohen’s story begins in traditional venture capital, where he saw firsthand both the power and the limitations of finance. While VC could create jobs and generate wealth, it could also widen the gap between those at the top and everyone else. Could capital markets be redesigned to actively close those gaps instead? The answer took shape in the form of the social impact bond – a financial instrument where investor returns are tied directly to measurable social outcomes. The first was used to reduce reoffending among UK prisoners, shifting the risk from taxpayers to investors and incentivizing real results over box-ticking. From there, Sir Ronald Cohen went further, creating “impact accounting” – a framework to measure corporate social and environmental performance in monetary terms. It’s a practical idea because people understand numbers more than anything else; hence, the approach to valuing impact is the same as valuing profit. Adam Swersky, Former CEO, Social Finance Adam Swersky’s work at Social Finance has been instrumental in the creation and scaling of social impact bonds and similar outcomes-based financing models. Adam explains how bringing finance into the equation can force a greater focus on measurable outcomes, driving partnerships that are laser-focused on solving acute social problems. From the Peterborough Prison Program to the Mental Health Unemployment Partnership, Adam’s experience demonstrates how applying capital to social issues creates a discipline around results, sustainability, and long-term impact. Simon Bond, Former Executive Director of RI Portfolio Management, Columbia Threadneedle Investments At Columbia Threadneedle, Simon managed the UK and European Social Bond Funds – large-scale, diversified portfolios where every bond issued was tied to a clear, measurable social benefit. This is not philanthropy disguised as investing. These funds delivered market-rate returns while financing projects like affordable housing, education, public health, and climate resilience. Simon calls it “positive inclusion” – actively seeking out issuers whose activities deliver net social gain. Every investment was assessed not just on financial merit, but on its documented social outcomes. And because these are public market instruments, the scale was enormous, allowing institutional investors to channel billions into projects that might otherwise be underfunded, without sacrificing liquidity or returns. — | |||
| Renewables Alone Won’t Work: The 2 Missing Pieces in the Net Zero Energy Puzzle | 19 Aug 2025 | 01:34:39 | |
We’ve spent decades talking about the shift to renewables – building more wind, more solar, more clean energy capacity. And that’s important. But it’s also only half the story. Because once that energy is generated, what happens next is where things start to get complicated – how it's stored, how it's moved, and how much of it actually gets used. Right now, the answer to that last question is… not much. In fact, the majority of global energy still gets lost before it ever reaches an end user. This week, we’re revisiting two past conversations – both of them centered on the part of the energy transition most people don’t see. One looks at the massive, under-addressed problem of energy waste – and the business models turning that waste into investment-grade infrastructure. The other zooms in on large-scale battery storage and what it takes to keep a renewable-heavy grid stable. These are two very different approaches to the same problem: not just how we generate clean energy, but how we manage it after it’s made. Because if we don’t solve that part, the rest doesn’t work. Here are the featured guests: Jonathan Maxwell, Founding Partner and CEO of Sustainable Development Capital (SDCL) Jonathan Maxwell founded SDCL with a simple observation: the world isn’t just short on clean energy – it’s wasting most of the energy it already has. While the market poured trillions into new renewables, Jonathan zeroed in on the overlooked half of the story: how energy is used, moved, and lost before it ever reaches the point of need. He started SDCL in 2007 as an advisory shop, designing environmental infrastructure funds for clients like HSBC and the World Bank. But by 2012, the firm became an investor, building and financing projects that cut waste, generate energy on-site, and make buildings, industry, and transport far more efficient. Today, SDCL manages $2.5 billion in assets across over 50,000 properties in 10 countries. Their portfolio spans projects from industrial heat recovery to citywide biogas and low-carbon power for data centers. The common thread is delivering cheaper, cleaner, more reliable energy, without requiring customers to put up the capital themselves. Ben Guest, the Managing Director of Gresham House New Energy Division, Gresham House Energy Storage Fund Ben Guest leads Gresham House’s New Energy Division, home to the UK’s largest battery storage portfolio. His team controls close to a quarter of the market – a position built on one core idea: if renewables are going to power the future, they need somewhere to live when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing. Battery storage is that missing piece. Because wind and solar don’t produce power all the time. But the grid still has to stay balanced every second of every day. That’s what these battery projects do – they take in power when there’s too much, release it when there’s not enough, and do it over and over, many times a day. Ben’s team is hands-on from start to finish. They find sites near key substations, secure planning and grid connections, oversee construction, run operations, and work with optimizers to trade power for the best returns. At the time of this conversation, they were managing more than £1.4 billion, with returns well above their 10% target for two years in a row. — | |||
| The Collision of Healthcare & Tech: Where Innovation Meets Patient Impact & Market Returns | 12 Aug 2025 | 01:24:52 | |
Healthcare is filled with breakthrough claims. But most of what gets funded doesn’t make it anywhere near a hospital ward, a low-income patient, or a parent juggling three jobs. The gap between what’s possible and what’s actually useful is real, and these two investors are trying to close it. This week, we revisit two conversations with fund managers who are focused on problems that actually matter: the rising cost of care, the complexity of getting it, and the systems that still leave too many people behind. Their portfolios include diagnostics that reduce medical error, wearables that predict seizures, virtual platforms that help people manage chronic illness, and yes – even robotics that could expand access to fertility care. But this isn’t just about cutting-edge tech. It’s about a bigger question: What role do businesses – and the investors backing them – play in creating health? Because at the end of the day, a healthier population isn’t just good policy. It’s good business, too. Here are the featured guests: Dr. Tara Bishop, Founder and Managing Director of Black Opal Ventures Tara Bishop is investing at the collision point – where healthcare and technology meet, and where legacy capital still struggles to keep up. At Black Opal Ventures, she’s backing startups that don’t just make care more digital – they make it more intelligent, more precise, and more accessible. Black Opal is one of the few female- and minority-led VC funds in the health-tech space. Tara and her partner Eileen Tanghal bring deep domain expertise – medicine on one side, deep tech on the other – and they’re targeting high-impact companies that address the big four in healthcare: cost, quality, access, and security. For Tara, impact means solving problems that have outlasted decades of reform – inside what she calls a “behemoth of an industry” that affects lives at scale and rarely rewards innovation that puts patients first. Kieron Boyle, Chair of the Impact Investing Institute Kieron Boyle has spent years making the economic case for better health. At Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Foundation, he helped turn an 800-year-old endowment into a £100 million impact portfolio – funding everything from healthier food startups to housing for women and children at risk. Not because it’s charity. Because it's smart investing. Because a healthier society is more productive, more resilient, and more investable. His work started with a simple question: most of what drives health doesn’t happen in hospitals – so why should health investing stop at hospital walls? The team backed medical technologies and life sciences, yes – but also addressed the wider commercial determinants of health: food, air, housing, debt. Then they went further, pioneering a dual mandate that put health and financial return on equal footing. Now, as Chair of the UK’s Impact Investing Institute, Kieron is scaling that thinking. He’s working with long-term investors (including pension funds and sovereign wealth) to align trillions in assets with the outcomes that actually shape wellbeing: healthier people, stronger communities, and more sustainable systems. — | |||