Sustainable Finance

MARKET HIGHLIGHTS | JULY 2022

The SPO team delivered over 40 external reviews in the second quarter, including some innovative transactions:

Turning to regulation and market standards development, the ICMA announced a series of updates and new tools during the latest Green Bond Principles Annual General Meeting. These include:

• New definitions for green and social securitizations clarifying terminology and market practice, notably for collateral
• A new registry of approximately 300 key performance indicators (KPIs) for Sustainability-Linked Bonds that classifies the KPIs by sector and provides guidance on the core or secondary nature of the indicators
• Last but not least, the ICMA’s Guidelines for External Reviews have been updated to support the assessment of alignment with the existing Climate Transition Finance Handbook (CTFH)

At the EU level, talks with the trialogue continue on the EU Green Bond Standard (GBS) draft, with the adoption of the legislative text expected by the end of this year. While many elements of the standard remain open, including its voluntary nature, the European Parliament has already given a clear indication about its idea of “green” projects, by approving gas and nuclear eligibility for inclusion in the EU Taxonomy. This underscores the new dilemma of our times, in which sustainability and energy security appear to clash amid geopolitical tensions, such the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

OUR PEOPLE

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

Salima Kettani, Vice President, has joined our Sustainable Finance Business Development team, covering Benelux, Middle East, Africa, and Turkey. Salima comes from Bank of America where she was a Debt Capital Markets banker in the Middle East, Africa & Turkey origination, structuring and financing team, focusing on international bond transactions for Corporate, Financial Institution and Sovereign issuers. Salima also worked as a Corporate Banker at Bank of America. Prior to Bank of America, Salima held various investment banking positions at Nomura, Natixis and Credit Suisse.

She holds a MSc in Risk Management and Financial Engineering from Imperial College London and a MSc in Finance from Pantheon Sorbonne University in Paris.

As external reviewers, the SPO team have delivered over 470 SPOs according to rigorous and well-respected standards. Below is a summary of our client successes in Q2 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.