Sustainable Finance

MARKET HIGHLIGHTS | APRIL 2022

The SPO team delivered some 30 external reviews in the first quarter, including some innovative transactions:

Regarding regulation, the EU Platform on Sustainable Finance presented its final Social Taxonomy Report at the end of February. The initial approach, based on vertical and horizontal dimensions, has been replaced by a more traditional stakeholder-based structure, focused on workers, end-users and communities. The next step in the document’s development will include the definition of “minimum social safeguard” the prioritization of objectives and sub-objectives and the definitions of “substantial contribution” and “do no significant harm” (DNSH) criteria.

Outside Europe, work continues on the Common Ground Taxonomy, an initiative that seeks to more closely align EU and Chinese sustainable finance taxonomies.

UPCOMING EVENTS

FROM ESG

OUR PEOPLE

ISS Corporate Solutions is pleased to announce two new hires to its global Sustainable Finance and Lending team.

Benjamin Long joined as the Vice President of the Sustainable Finance and Lending team, where he will lead SPO sales for U.S. issuers. He joins from Notified (Formerly Nasdaq Corporate Solutions) where he was an Enterprise Account Manager Servicing Fortune 500 Investor Relations teams. Prior to this he held client relationship roles at Natixis Asset Managers, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley.

Ben holds a B.B.A. in Finance from the Herbert School of Business at the University of Miami, and an M.B.A. from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.

Nikita Lee has been appointed as the Sustainable Finance Business Manager of the Sustainable Finance and Lending team in Asia-Pacific, where she will lead SPO sales for Asia-Pacific issuers. Prior to this appointment, Nikita joined ISS Corporate Solutions as an advisor specializing in corporate governance and ESG advisory projects related to M&A, board structure and shareholder activism. Prior to this, she worked at Bloomberg New Energy Finance and CECEP Environmental Consulting Group (China Energy Conservation Group). As a Green Finance Analyst, she worked with asset management companies in ESG Risk Analysis, Sustainable Investment Strategy and Green Finance Product Development. She was also the Secretariat of the Hong Kong Green Finance Association’s ESG Disclosure and Integration Working Group.

Nikita began her career at BNP Paribas CIB. She holds a MSc in Local Economic Development from the London School of Economics.

 

As external reviewers, the SPO team have delivered over 430 SPOs according to rigorous and well-respected standards. Below is a summary of our client successes in Q1 2022.

Since 2014, the holistic approach adopted in our SPO reports has included an evaluation of the issuer’s ESG performance, providing context to the issuance subject to our opinion. Leveraging this approach and internal expertise, the issuer evaluation is now enhanced, streamlining the focus on the prevalent ESG factors impacting the issuer’s activity and its link with the sustainable finance framework. This revised approach will be implemented in all new SPOs issued from mid-April 2022.

In parallel, the Use of Proceed categories’ impact on the UN Sustainable Development Goals will also be expanded, providing further details on the impact of products/services-related categories, and of process-related categories. This will allow a clearer focus on assessing the positive impacts of Use of Proceeds categories relating to operational improvement. This approach will also be implemented from mid-April 2022.

*By way of background, ISS Corporate Solutions (ICS) works in collaboration with ISS ESG, the responsible investment arm of Institutional Shareholder Services, as the distributor of SPOs. While the SPOs are sold and distributed by ICS, the analytical work to prepare and issue SPOs is performed by ISS ESG.