SRI360 | Sustainable & Responsible Investing, Impact Investing, ESG, Socially Responsible Investing

Scott Arnell
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SRI360 explores how professional and institutional investors use impact investing and sustainable finance to shape real-world outcomes. Each episode features an in-depth conversation with a leading investor in public or private equities, public or private debt, venture capital, or real assets. We focus on the mechanics of investing: how strategies are designed, how capital is allocated, how impact is achieved and measured, and where incentives succeed, or fail, within asset-owner systems. If you want clear, honest insight into the future of sustainable & responsible investing from the people shaping it, this show is your competitive edge.    Learn more at SRI360.com.

  1. 5d ago

    Base of the Pyramid to Pension Fund: What Four Emerging-Market Funds Actually Returned | BlueOrchard · BII · IIX · EPIC World (#143)

    🌎 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: Philipp Mueller, CEO, BlueOrchard (at time of recording), CEO of Blue Earth Capital AG (Present)Nick O'Donohoe, Former CEO, British International InvestmentRobert Kraybill, CIO and Managing Director, Impact Investment ExchangeJyotsna Krishnan, CEO and Co-Founder, EPIC WorldListen 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°:  Explore all episodes of the SRI360° Podcast  Sign up for the free weekly email update Key Takeaways: Four practitioners discuss deal-level performance data, loss rates, exits, and recovery rates - in markets most institutions walk straight past, making the case that the risk is systematically mispriced.How the world's largest microfinance fund deploys $2.4 billion through a single-intermediary model - one trusted local institution between the fund and the end borrower and why avoiding government-linked institutions is central to that discipline.How BII turned a 2% return target into a 5% actual return across seven years of African macro turmoil, and how the PSI Impact Score gave investment officers and committees a shared framework to evaluate impact rigorously.How the Women's Livelihood Bond grew from an $8.5 million first issuance to a $100 million sixth bond sold almost exclusively to pension funds, listed on the Singapore Exchange, backed by a 90/10 senior/first-loss structure and a partial Sida guarantee, and now underpinned by the Orange Bond Principles designed to open the gender lens investing market to other issuers.Why 70% of India's population remains nearly invisible to global allocators and why COVID, household resilience data, and EPIC World's distribution infrastructure make the case that the risk perception is wrong and the opportunity is larger than the capital flowing into it suggests.Here's what you're in for: 00:00 – Intro: Impact Investing's Disclosure Problem 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

  2. Aug 6

    The $120 Trillion Repricing: 4 Investors on the Carbon Bubble, Stranded Assets & Real Returns | (#142)

    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: Why one investor treats greenhouses like data centers — build, operate, and manage technology obsolescence“Distributed abundance”: unhooking where food is grown from climate and geographyWhy climate adaptation, not mitigation, is the urgent thesis for India’s smallholder economyHow a forest generates two revenue streams — timber and California carbon credits — at onceUnderwriting a 30-year biological asset you can leave “on the shelf” to growThe “unburnable carbon” thesis, and why $120 trillion of reserves back $7–8 trillion of market capStranded assets: why building new fossil supply guarantees write-downsFeatured guests: Dave Chen, CEO Equilibrium CapitalMark Kahn, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, OmnivoreRadha Kuppalli, Former Managing Director, Impact and Advocacy, at New ForestsMark Campanale, Founder & CEO, Carbon Tracker InitiativeDiscover More from SRI360°: Explore all episodes of the SRI360° PodcastSign up for the free weekly email update Additional Resources Dave Chen — Equilibrium Capital Equilibrium Capital: https://eq-cap.com/ Dave Chen bio: https://eq-cap.com/about-us/dave-chen/ Dave Chen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dypchen1/ Listen to the full episode here: https://sri360.com/podcast/dave-chen/ Mark Kahn — Omnivore Omnivore: https://www.omnivore.vc/ Mark Kahn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-kahn-20490a/ Listen to the full episode here: https://sri360.com/podcast/mark-kahn/ Radha Kuppalli — New Forests New Forests: https://newforests.com.au/ Radha Kuppalli on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/radha-kuppalli/ Listen to the full episode here:https://sri360.com/podcast/radha-kuppalli/ Mark Campanale — Carbon Tracker Initiative Carbon Tracker Initiative: https://carbontracker.org/ Mark Campanale on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-campanale-1886203/ Listen to the full episode here: https://sri360.com/podcast/mark-campanale/

  3. Jul 30

    A 1% Loss Rate “Unheard Of” in Frontier Markets: How Local-Currency Lending Rewrites African Credit Risk | Clemens Calice, Cygnum Capital (#141)

    🌎 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  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/

  4. Jul 23

    China Makes 70% of the World's Vitamins: The Fermentation Edge Hiding in Idle Factories | Matilda Ho, Bits x Bites (#140)

    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: Why the food system cannot be fixed at the checkout, and what changes upstreamHalf a million food safety incidents a year — the consulting project that exposed themBiomanufacturing as China’s unpriced edge: overcapacity, brownfield sites and idle fermentation tanksWhy alternative meat fails on unit economics in a country that already has tofuChina’s “visible hand” — how government money became the largest source of innovation capitalSelling a portfolio company to a provincial government vehicle, and why DPI beats IRR in ChinaWhy she will not write a check without a board seatBacking wartime CEOs, and what a decade of bad hires taught her about founder diligenceFeatured guest: Matilda Ho, Founder and Managing Director at Bits x BitesListen Next: AgTech Profits Meet Planet: Where Climate Impact and VC Returns Align Discover More from SRI360°: Explore all episodes of the SRI360° PodcastSign up for the free weekly email updateKey Takeaways: Fixing food at the checkout does not scale. Matilda built an online farmers market and learned that people only change how they eat after a life event — a birth, a diagnosis. A movement, she says, but not a viable business model. The leverage sits upstream in the supply chain.The supply chain is the problem. In China a vegetable passes through roughly seven hands before it reaches a table. A third of food rots on the farm, another third in transit, and the rest is wasted in fridges and warehouses.China’s arithmetic is brutal. Around 20% of the world’s population and under 7% of its arable land, feeding 1.4 billion people. More than 85% of soybeans are imported, mostly to feed chickens and pigs.Biomanufacturing is China’s quiet edge. Europe’s biotech founders struggle to fund scale-up. China has the opposite problem — overcapacity, brownfield sites and idle fermentation tanks, plus the plant managers who know how to run them. 70% of global vitamins, two-thirds of amino acids and over 80% of stevia are already produced there.Cost is king and taste is king. Beyond Burger’s peas grow in Canada, get processed in Suzhou, then travel to California for final formulation. The gross margin never works. And as she puts it, China already has tofu — clean, plant-based, cheap, and 2,000 years old.Government money is now the largest source of innovation capital in China. Local governments run fund-of-fund structures and back specialized GPs rather than investing directly. Her own first exit was selling a stake to a provincial government vehicle at Series B, in year five of the fund.In China, DPI matters more than IRR. IRR can be manipulated; cash returned to LPs cannot. Most domestic funds have only a five-year life, which forces short-term decisions. Her USD fund has ten to twelve years.Back wartime CEOs, not peacetime ones. Growing revenue tenfold when money was free is not a replicable track record. She looks for humility, grit, and founders who keep going when 99% of the signals say stop.Software alone does not work in agriculture. Farmers will not pay for something invisible. Her Beijing crop-model company had to bundle seeds and inputs with the software; two-thirds of its revenue now comes from selling the inputs.Drones changed the economics for smallholders. A tenth of the chemical input, up to half the water saved, and profits up around 30% on cash crops — plus a whole new job class of drone operators. Most growth is now outside China, in North America, Brazil and Argentina.Agrifood is under-invested. It accounts for less than 5% of total venture funding. Her ambition is that generalist fund managers eventually treat it as a sector worth a seat. Additional Resources 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

  5. Jul 15

    Too Big for Venture, Too Small for PE: Inside the ‘Missing Middle’ Where the Alpha Hides | Sanjeev Krishnan, S2G Investments (#139)

    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: Why capital structure, not technology, is what really holds back the clean economyThe “missing middle” — too big for venture, too small for private equity, and where good companies get strandedWhat “investing at the seams” of food, energy, and ocean systems actually meansFit-for-purpose capital, and why biotech figured it out but climate has notThe five forces behind his “Age of Adaptation” thesisWhy he reframes climate as a 10,000-year economic megatrend, not a moral crusadeHis bet on the oceans, and the company measuring water almost no one else canFeatured guest: Sanjeev Krishnan, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at S2G InvestmentsListen Next: AgTech Profits Meet Planet: Where Climate Impact and VC Returns Align Discover More from SRI360°: Explore all episodes of the SRI360° PodcastSign up for the free weekly email updateKey Takeaways: Capital structure is the constraint, not technology. Across thirty years, Sanjeev watched good companies with real products fail because the money backing them was shaped wrong for what they were building.The missing middle is where good companies get stranded. A business with real revenue and real profits can still be too capital-intensive for venture and too small for private equity control. Venture wants a power law. These companies just grow steadily. So nobody funds them. In May, S2G closed a billion-dollar fund built for exactly this gap.Fit-for-purpose capital means matching the money to the reality. US biotech built a system that can take an unproven, clinical-stage company public and attract hundreds of millions. Climate has never built its equivalent. That, Sanjeev argues, is the real gap.Every great transition needed a financial invention first. The joint stock company made oceanic trade possible. Bond syndicates built the railroads. The venture partnership funded the microchip. In each case someone built the financial container before the future arrived.Impact does not have to be concessionary. At the IFC, his team helped cut the cost of a Hepatitis B vaccine by roughly 80–90% — from $2.50 a vial — while margins stayed above 60–70%. Cheaper, faster, better, and profitable at the same time.Invest at the seams. The best opportunities sit between asset classes and between sectors, where a typical energy investor would dismiss it and a food investor would call it something else — so nobody underwrites it.Climate is a 10,000-year economic megatrend, not a moral crusade. Humans take useful energy and turn it into useful materials — fire, agriculture, fossil fuels. And the next chapter will still be extractive: it needs copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium.Busts are where the returns are made. You learn more in the bust cycles than the boom cycles. Markets overshoot both ways, and the companies that survive get forced into product-market fit and a real P&L.The oceans are the least measured part of the planet. We know more about space. Sanjeev co-founded Apeiron Labs in 2022 to close a data gap between 6 and 200 meters — data that matters for weather, offshore wind, insurance, and defense. Additional Resources 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/

  6. Jul 9

    Good Deals Don't Make Good Markets: Why Impact Investing Needs More Than Capital | Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen, GSG Impact (#138)

    🌎 Get the latest updates on Sustainable & Responsible Investing at: https://sri360.com/newsletter/ What does it take to move impact investing from individual transactions to a system?  And what does that mean for the field when the global development finance landscape shifts so dramatically in such a short period of time?  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:  Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen, CEO and Executive Director, GSG Impact Listen Next: Conversation with Leslie Maasdorp: From Apartheid to the BRICS Bank to BII — Leslie Maasdorp's Journey Through Development Finance Discover More from SRI360°: Explore all episodes of the SRI360° Podcast Sign up for the free weekly email update  Here’s what you’re in for: 00:00 – Intro & Trailer 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/

  7. Jul 1

    95% of Emissions, 14% of the Capital: The Bond Market Mispricing in Plain Sight | Elizabeth Alm, Saturna Capital (#137)

    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: Why a bond's label tells you the plan, not the real-world impactHow sukuk (Islamic bonds) work, and why they must be backed by real assetsWhy investors who are not Muslim are buying sukukA bond she loves: Tabreed, the UAE cooling company that cuts emissionsWhy sovereigns with high physical climate risk are 18% more likely to defaultHow satellite monitoring helped identify and mitigate 30,000 child-labor cases in a cocoa supply chainThe wave of AI data-center debt, and why she is cautious about itFeatured guest: Elizabeth Alm,Senior Investment Analyst and Portfolio Manager at Saturna CapitalListen Next: Patrick Drum — Saturna Capital (Episode 16): Saturna's Patrick Drum on Islamic Finance, Faith-Based Investing, Sustainable Outcomes, ESG and MoreDiscover More from SRI360°: Explore all episodes of the SRI360° PodcastSign up for the free weekly email update

  8. Jun 24

    From Goldman Sachs to Excel Hell: Measuring Sustainability That ESG Ratings Miss | Samantha Duncan, Net Purpose (#136)

    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: Samantha Duncan, Founder and CEO of Net Purpose Listen Next: • 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°: Explore all episodes of the SRI360° PodcastSign up for the free weekly email update

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SRI360 explores how professional and institutional investors use impact investing and sustainable finance to shape real-world outcomes. Each episode features an in-depth conversation with a leading investor in public or private equities, public or private debt, venture capital, or real assets. We focus on the mechanics of investing: how strategies are designed, how capital is allocated, how impact is achieved and measured, and where incentives succeed, or fail, within asset-owner systems. If you want clear, honest insight into the future of sustainable & responsible investing from the people shaping it, this show is your competitive edge.    Learn more at SRI360.com.

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