Sustainability: insights from institutional investors

Jean-Paul Branchet:

Hello and welcome. My name is Jean-Paul Branchet, a relationship manager at BNP Paribas Securities Services business.

I’m glad to be your host today for this podcast where we capture how our clients are integrating ESG in real life. In this episode, we are discussing how institutional investors navigate in an evolving landscape for ESG regulation. I’m delighted to be joined today by the representatives of two French leading institutions on how ESG integration is evolving in practice beyond regulatory compliance and on the challenges financial institutions are facing.

I’m happy to be joined by Marie Lassegnore from Credit Mutual Asset Management, part of the La Française Group, with around 100bn assets under management and part of the mutual banking group that has adopted the mission-driven company status. Credit Mutuel Asset Management combines financial performance with long-term sustainability objectives. Marie, welcome.

I’m also pleased to welcome Jean-François Coppenolle from Abeille Assurances, a French insurance company, strongly committed to responsible investment with a strategy that places climate action, biodiversity and social responsibility at the core of its long-term approach. Jean-Francois, thank you for accepting our invite.

Marie, let’s start. Could you introduce yourself and tell us what sparked your interest in ESG and sustainable finance?

Marie Lassegnore:

Thanks. Hi, everyone. So very briefly, I started my career in London and did most of it as a portfolio manager on the credit side, so studying company basically, but very early on, it geared towards sustainable finance as the sustainable bond market was starting really to pick up. And that’s how I personally got convinced that combining financial markets with sustainable outcomes was definitely something, a path I wanted to follow. And that’s when then I joined La Française, which later became Credit Mutuel Asset Management, to first deploy the franchise of low carbon fixed income asset management and then head the research team.

So I now have the pleasure to head the credit research, ESG research and stewardship capabilities for Credit Mutuel Asset Management and lead on the strategy of our common practices and specific sustainable products.

Jean-François Coppenolle:

 Yes. So a bit like Marie I spent most of my career in London. In 2015, there was a quite a semillant speech from Mark Carney, called “The tragedy of the horizon”. Mark Carney highlighted really the disconnect between climate risk and the way institutional investors make decision making and the timelines associated to this decision making, which are, you know, kind of shorter than the climate risk horizon. And the same year, there was the launch of the TCFD, so the taskforce for climate financial disclosures and these two events really started to reshape how financial institutions think about climate related risk and opportunities. And I really wanted to be part of how this new paradigm was being shaped.

I contributed to the work of EFRAG, working on climate related scenario analysis, and then I took part in the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance where I took the lead on sector targets, so I had the opportunity to really shape what the NZAO would become.

And for me it was really important that asset owners come together, allowed and helped to move climate and sustainability really from the margin to the very core of financial strategy. And that’s really shaped my role at Aviva until 2021 and then, at Abeille assurances, which I joined in 2021 where now I am head of general fund investment management, unit linked selection and management and ESG integration.

Abeille Assurances is part of the Aéma Groupe. Aéma Groupe is a mutual insurance company so it’s owned by its policyholders and it’s a major actor in France of the social economy. So in my team, we oversee around €90 billion in assets: so 60 billion in the securities fund and 30 billion in units and products.

And what’s really important is that we dedicate a fair share of our assets to sustainability: so we have 13% of our assets which are already invested into sustainable strategies, and we commit every year at least €500 million investment into sustainable assets. And something I’m particularly proud of is that since 2019, we have reduced the carbon intensity of our corporate investment portfolio by nearly 60%, so versus a target of 25%, so that’s a very concrete outcome of what we’re doing about sustainability and climate.

Jean-Paul:

Thank you very much for this introduction Marie, Jean-Francois. Let’s now dive into our topic. Over the past few years, ESG regulation expanded significantly. And at the same time, many institutions have already started integrating sustainability principles in their decision making and risk framework.

Jean-Francois, from your perspective, how do you distinguish between meeting regulatory compliance and genuine sustainability integration in your decision making?

Jean-François:

Okay, so, to start with, I would say that from my perspective, regulatory compliance is already a form of genuine sustainability integration, but it’s only part of the bigger pictures. Regulation plays a crucial role: it does send a strong signal to market participants, it helps steer investment flow towards more sustainable outcomes, it does strengthen financial risk management and also, maybe more importantly, does allow to improve the quality of information that’s made available to both investors and clients. So in that respect, CSRD and SFDR are very good examples I think we’ll come back to that later.

And it also creates a level playing field across all market participants. And all of this is absolutely essential. Something I wanted to say also is that, in France, the journey towards sustainability started quite early. This existing framework was built on foundations like the article 173 of the French Energy Transition and Green Crossroads that was launched in 2015, so just in the wake of the Paris COP. And at the time, it had a massive impact on French assets owners: they really had to start integrating ESG, started thinking how to align investment portfolios on the 1.5 degrees trajectory pathway. And then at European level, we had key regulations for assets owners such as SFDR and CSRD which helped shaped the EU Green Deal.

Regulation, I believe, really accelerated ESG integration and really pushed financial institutions, even those that were not convinced, that was necessary to progressively align assets with net zero ambitions. Regulations and the sustainability-related regulation push that we saw since the Paris COP was really a powerful catalyst for change for asset owners and financial institutions alike.

In the context of Abeille Assurances, our commitment to sustainability was actually previous to many of these regulatory developments. So, in that sense, ESG integration wasn’t something we adopted because we had to, it was really already embedded in our investment approach, but the regulation, kind of help us to shape it more and to make it more embedded in an holistic fashion into our investment approach.

What’s good is that European regulators like ESMA, like EIOPA, EBA have worked very closely together and we have a very strong level of coordination. I think in Europe, we are lucky to have is very effective regulatory framework and implementation. However, I believe that the framework that has emerged, can appear as not always sufficiently adapted to retail clients, it can be quite complex for retail clients to really understand what are the potential sustainability outcome of their investing, of their asset allocation.

So for example, when we ask customers about their sustainability objectives, we have to ask them about what percentage of their asset allocation, of their investment portfolio, they want to be aligned to taxonomy, and that’s something that, even for investment professionals is quite difficult to understand.

So I think we maybe need to keep it as simple as possible, because sometimes, trying to make it super fancy is not making it super effective. I would say that sustainability integration is not only about ticking regulatory boxes, it’s how we translate our core sustainability investment beliefs into concrete investment practices. So that means we have to make choices, we have to define hat exclusion we’re going to apply to our portfolio in terms of tobacco, weapons, oil and gas, for example; and more importantly, how, as an asset owner, how we try to optimise asset performance under ESG constraints.

And this is the crux of the implementation of sustainability: how to manage this optimisation under ESG constraints. What makes a big difference is that we still deliver the financial performance that our clients rightly expect while maintaining a strengthened exigence in terms of ESG integration.

Jean-Paul:

Marie, what’s your view, with regards to the integration of regulatory compliance? What’s the situation at Credit Mutuel Asset Management?

Marie:

Yeah. Thanks for the question. I guess, there’s a history in which you would answer differently to that question.  When ethical finance kind of turned into the movements of ESG integration, it was really perceived as a tick-the-box exercise, and then the rush of going into SFDR 1.0 created an acceleration of the way asset managers have structured themselves to be able to provide products under this regulation.

But now, now we are a couple of years down SFDR. We are at a maturity level which is very different. So for most asset managers that have chosen sustainability as a mission, regulation is really no longer defining because we’ve spent some time and resources structuring our organisations, hiring the right people, staffing sustainability departments, training all of our employees, training portfolio managers but also middle officers, data, creating data hubs specific, like, you know, specifically designed to handle sustainability information.

And therefore, I’d say that, obviously the answer can differ depending on the size that you have and the inner commitments you have to sustainability, but I would say that it’s now no longer so much of a constraint because most people have invested in it. It’s more so like the level of commitments you’re putting to sustainability.

The point about regulation is that it’s supposed to standardise the rules of the game. Jean-François already mentioned it, but the whole point is for this regulated environment of products to reach the clients, so that it’s more clear, the offer makes more sense, and a client that wants to invest in a sustainable product can identify it and invest in it.

I’ll go back to this later today in our discussion, but the way we have tried to design what we offer to the clients, has been shifting away from just a couple of products in the way that, you said it, our shareholder is a mission-driven group, and we are a mutualist group itself, so that means that we carry strong values about the way we practice businesses and, what we wanted to put in place was a set of common ground, meaning that any of our funds really would embed the structural values that we are carrying for the environment and society. That’s why we’ve organised ourselves in a way that, for instance, my team is a central research team: the analysts within those, we are 15 people, and people across sectors cover companies from a financial perspective, ESG perspective, and they perform the voting and engagement on those companies as well. You’re creating expertise which, in the same head as much as possible, tries to embed all the factors. This organisation is specifically designed because we truly believe that sustainability is an alpha-generation driver.

And you’ll see that this is core to what everything we’ve built. This is core to the cost we are allocating to ESG overall. And so building that common ground, to be very specific, that means that for 98.6% of our AUM under open funds, we are applying the levers of exclusion, controversy management, integration, voting and engagement, our full priorities around climate change, natural capital, social capital and governance.

Then, of course, we have dedicated products which are what people can see as being on shelf really, and those dedicated products will have specific sustainability objectives, and that’s roughly 30% of our AUMs. But the trend that we see is not so much that the regulation is shaping us in the way that we are thinking about the new investment products, it’s more so that our clients, that are very high-end clients in terms of their sustainability preferences, they would require us to have specific, on demand, capabilities to be able to meet exactly the needs they have with regards to their decarbonisation strategy. I mean, Jean-François mentioned the NZAO initiative, but there could be specific like, you know, social, social outcomes, they would be looking for, etc.

Jean-Paul:

Thank you very much for that. It is clear that both companies have integrated ESG at a strategic level, and that will shape your future action and plans. But we know that moving from ambition to implementation is when things become more complex, especially in this type of organisation and evolving landscape.

Jean-Paul Branchet:

Marie, what is for you the biggest barrier to meeting those regulatory expectation, and how are you adapting yourself with regards to that?

Marie:

I think we are in a much better place, again, than we were five years ago, because, you know, there’s been an increase in coverage from data providers around the investment environment, and we’ve seen, you know, increased disclosure and transparency from corporate: CSRD has briefly helped on this. But even from outside the EU, we’ve seen an improved transparency level.

But what we still see is lack of data availability on some pockets of the markets and quality heterogeneity in a way. Basically, what I mean is we’re now in a place where we can, through data providers, essentially cover most of the markets we would be investing in, right: vanilla, listed equities in Europe, in the US, you can even do emerging market with decent coverage.

But then the question is not so much coverage, it’s about what is the inner quality underneath? Do you rely on estimation model? What are the level of actually reported information in that reported information? Is your provider fit for challenging the quality and scoping of that measurement and data? I guess we’re now in a phase where conscious of this, so most asset managers were facing the duality of, we need to have high quality data on pockets of the market where we know that it’s insufficient, so we need innovation, we need new ways of gathering that data; and at the same time, we need coverage and breadth. But on breadth, and to be able to challenge the underlying methodologies, we might require to have several data providers to be able to challenge them, to challenge the methodologies and all of this, it’s quite resource intensive, right.

So in the end, it is a challenge for those who are committed to sustainability, because it’s only if it’s your mission to be thinking sustainability is a alpha generation driver. Therefore, I want to have the right indicators, the right signals and that’s when you’re asking yourself: do I have the right signals in a bookdata I’m receiving ?, that you then start to be thinking, well, I should be investing more in quality and in diversity of the information I’m getting.

Of course, if you’re in a situation where sustainability is a secondhand priority, and you might not have the financial resources to accommodate for all those costs, then you might be in a very different position than the one I’m describing. But that’s where we are now. And, and again, especially after 2025 and going into 2026 where you might have some commercial headwinds with regards to sustainability products, I guess, what we can spend time on, is actually taking that time to use our role to discuss with data providers about those issues, because we know that this is something which, will especially with the simplification of CSRD, it will remain an issue into SFDR version 2 coming up.

Jean-Paul:

Thank you. Marie. Jean-Francois, do you share that view? And do you see other gaps or challenges?

Jean-François:

I think Marie said it all: having a strong ESG ambition is always the easy part. It is just the implementation phase, that’s where it starts to get really difficult and complex.

Our objective as an asset owner is very clear, it is really to, as I mentioned previously, is to optimise the portfolio performance within defined risk constraints while integrating ESG consideration and regulatory expectations. But this is extremely challenging because, as we discussed, ESG is very multi-dimensional: we have environment, we have social, we have governance, and we have a lot of factors that shape these three main ESG dimensions. And in addition, we have the regulation that continues to raise the bar.

If I had to identify the biggest barriers to meeting current regulatory expectations, I would mention that it’s about the clarity and usability of ESG data. At the moment we have access to more and more data and it can seem to be quite overwhelming how to deal with this scope of data.

And in addition, this glut of data is not always of top quality, and we work the data to make it insightful. And it comes from multiple sources, so it means that we need to create adequate IT systems to really manipulate these data and understand them. So, I think to us, part of the challenge is also to understand what truly matters, how to interpret this data and, more essentially, how to turn them into concrete investment decisions.

And without this vision, and it’s where, I guess, strategy differs from a simple tick-the-box regulatory exercise, there’s risk that ESG becomes just a reporting exercise, and that’s precisely what we want to avoid: we want ESG to become value creation, we want ESG to add Alpha to our investment strategy. And in that respect, I believe that artificial intelligence will play a major role in helping us manipulating this data and interpreting it more effectively.

And I think this challenge, in relation to using the data is very visible when it comes to the social dimension of ESG. To me, it is really seen as the most difficult aspect of ESG to deal with. Social factors are not sufficiently integrated into investment phases because the data is more difficult to understand, and also there’s perhaps less materiality on financial performance when it comes to integrating this data: they are harder to measure, less standardised. I think that’s the next challenge in terms of ESG integration. And if we want to have a real impact on society, that’s really important to be able to integrate this data in the way you manage assets. Most of these changes are not unique to Abeille Assurances, it is across the industry that asset owners and asset managers are still struggling to really use this social-based data and how to prioritise them.

I think the best way to deal with it is about being very disciplined about the vision we want to implement, how to link investment beliefs, sustainability outcomes with ESG data and how feed it into asset allocation and investment decision. And also one barrier we have to address is by focusing on how we convince our clients, our retail investors, that it makes sense to invest sustainability.

So, it’s about making them understand what’s the real impact of their investment on the real economy while still delivering very good financial performance that our clients do expect; and also making our clients understand what sustainability is about and I think that’s really the biggest challenge for us because we know how to manage assets, by integrating ESG outcomes, we have the data. But it’s about, you know, making sure that our customers, our clients understand what it is about.

Jean-Paul:

Marie, Jean-François what you say about the lack of data and issues with data quality echoes with what we observe at BNP Paribas. In our latest ESG survey, there is a significant figure: 60% of investors still mention ESG data and research as one of their main challenges. So it’s really clear that data remains a challenge for any institutional investors despite the huge progress made in the past years.

ESG data are inconsistent, incomplete and non-standardised, so it’s hard for investors to translate them into effective decision making.  They look for more transparent and ultimately more decision-useful data to disclose and fulfil regulatory requirements and also measure the contribution to ESG goals.

And to respond to this challenge, on our side, at BNP Paribas, as an asset servicer, we continue to invest in solutions to support our clients in various fields, and of course ESG data is one of them.

If we now look forward at the regulatory landscape, ESG regulation continues to evolve rapidly, so I would like to have your view on which upcoming regulatory change do you expect will reshape your risk assessment or assets allocation over the next 3 years? Marie, do you want to start?

Marie:

We’ve already mentioned the kind of the cornerstone that we’re expecting: it’s SFDR in its second version and sustainability preferences, without which, you know, you can’t really achieve the purpose of SFDR. Today we have visibility over the product categories that the SFDR framework evolution is thinking of, so there’s not so much uncertainty.

It’s more so still the blurried area around certain criteria definitions, the implementation timeline, this will take time. Also, this framework was opened without yet opening the revision of MiFID2 and the sustainability preferences, and that’s really what’s key.

And Jean-Francois already mentioned it, and I echoed: without the end investor, we’re not doing anything that will materially change the ESG investing landscape in Europe, because you can create as many products as you want, if it doesn’t reach the target, you’re not changing the real economy, and ultimately that’s the goal, right? Channeling the flows towards the transformation of the real economy. There’s a study that was ran by theJean Jaurès Foundation in 2023 where they analysed the behaviour of 200,000 French investors with La France Mutualiste. And out of those people, 74% of them considered global warming as a major priority. 24% of them were already investing in their savings with an environmental criteria. However 58% of those French people still struggle to understand the benefits of the responsible financial products we’re offering them in front of that intent that they have.

Why? First, there’s clearly the lack of education in the intermediation, because in front of the investor you have several people in the chain between the producer of the fund and the final investor, and here you’re basically losing information and, as always in intermediation, but also you’re lacking a common foundation around financial education overall. And second, there is a stereotype that we commonly need to work on, but that’s just with education, is that purpose and performance cannot go hand in hand, it actually can! We have many, many cases to demonstrate that sustainability can be a performance driver.

It’s all about the sample, it’s all about how you use the information, it’s all about, you know, what are you comparing with which. Yes, if you’re comparing clean energy transition in front of the Magnificent Seven in their rise in the last couple of years, you’re comparing apples and carrots, very short-term oriented. And yes, there would be an underperformance, but you can’t really compare that.

And so there has been a lot of shortcuts that have been made with regards to the performance of sustainability product. And I’m truly convinced as well, that this has been biased by the products on shelf in front of clients. The SFDR framework has put forward to clients much more equity products in the SFDR 9 format to the end-clients, with less depth of products availability in fixed income or alternative asset classes which would, as a whole, make a good allocation in a certain risk framework, which is always the way we would think about a financial allocation to someone.

We can see that this is possible to change the behaviours because when we look at generation Z and millennials’ behaviours with regards to investing, you see that they could be more volatile in their savings’ behaviours, when I say volatile is less for the long-term, maybe short-term arbitrage, but they invest roughly double the Gen Z generation of their income than would the older generation invest in. And that’s based on a study which was made by a payment provider, because they are more connected with digital technology andinfluential voices around the financial markets, which in a sense, participate in financial education of the ecosystem.

This is where for me, material risk reshaping lie, and obviously it’s the hardest challenge to overcome: education. But I think that starts with watching closely how the sustainability preferences evolution pans out.

Jean-Paul:

 Thank you Marie. What about you, Jean-Francois? Do you see the same driver?

Jean-François:

Yeah, and I’d like to comment on one thing that Marie said and I fully agree with her.

Most sustainable funds, they are thematic funds, and therefore, comparing the performance of thematic funds with broad equity indices like the S&P 500, Euro Stoxx 50 doesn’t really make sense. And, I think that’s the problem because when in a business that’s intermediated, ultimately, intermediaries try to maximise the return for the clients of their investment portfolio, which makes total sense.

But, they just look at the major indices, equity indices. And so that’s not very favorable to sustainable investment products, insofar that they’re not really trained or they don’t really understand. So that’s a matter of education. And I think we see things evolving in the right direction.

I mean, it’s quite slow, but we know that people understand that they can invest in sustainability, they want to do it, they just don’t know how to do it. And if we can explain them in a simple way that basically investing in energy transition, in relation to protection of biodiversity can generate similar or very, very similar returns to growth indices, then I think that would make a big difference.

So in terms of regulatory changes and we mentioned SFDR, I hope that this more clearer labelling of funds will help shape and accelerate this transition towards a broader use of sustainable products by retail investors.

To deal with the question you just mentioned in terms of the major upcoming regulatory change that will reshape our risk investment or asset allocation, to me, if I had to point 1, as an investor, I would say that CSRD when data becomes available, that will be a game changer and also SFDR. So, for example, if we take a corporate bond portfolio, you know, traditionally, what we do in analysis is to focus on usual financial metrics such as the strength of the balance sheet, the profitability, what dynamics are at play within the sector we invest in. But with CSRD and the ESRS reporting, we’ll get more standardised information on transition plans, climate risk, workforce policies, supply chain impact, and we can see at the moment, with the current geopolitical context, that supply chain really matters when it comes to companies valuation.

So I think this will change gradually how we assess credit risk, especially for insurance companies, which are long-term investors since we have long-dated liabilities. When it comes to assessing the transition planning of a company, we’re getting to a point where we can see that there’s a reconciliation between this short-term investment horizon and the climate risk horizon.

So with that transition planning information that we can get from CSRD reporting, we can assess more accurately the extent of how much a company is exposed to climate risk over five or ten year period. So that matters to long-term investors like us. And this will have, I believe, over time, an impact that’s more and more preeminent on, for example, spreads expectations for sectors or even specific issuers in terms of sector allocation.

I believe that sustainability through CSRD and maybe, who knows, upcoming change in capital treatment for green assets, this will play a major role in how risk is assessed and portfolio are shaped, and when it comes to SFDR, I welcome the expected changes, expected proposal of the SFDR framework. And I believe that the review that’s underway, that’s basically moving towards a product category approach will help retail investors to see more clearly in the product offering.

With all of this data from an asset allocation perspective, I think more and more institutional investors will push towards a more outcome-focused portfolio construction: moving from a two dimensional-portfolio construction, taking into account risk and performance to a multiple dimensional-portfolio construction, taking all the risk, the performance obviously, but also the societal, environmental changes that we are facing, and that will only increase in the future. So that’s where I think there’s a great convergence of intent and regulatory objectives. That’s really great that regulation is really helping reshaping our investment toolkit.

So just to conclude,  over the next few years, ESG regulation won’t just frame sustainability, it will actively help us to steer capital towards sustainability outcomes.

Jean-Paul:

We definitely all hope sustainable finance will remain a main topic in the industry, for sure.

Jean-Paul:

Before we wrap up, one last question: what gives you the most confidence about the future of sustainable finance, Marie?

Marie:

The most confidence I have is, I mean, I’m not only convinced personally, but I do see the evidence, the empirical evidence of the positive equation of sustainability and how it creates value creation.

There was a study published around a couple of time by the BCG, which looks at a sample of 9,000 companies across 300 private equity funds. And it shows that over a holding period of four years on average, their decarbonisation efforts and diversity efforts have directly generated 7% growth in EBITDA in Europe, 4% in the US. So why? Because they chose what make most sense economically to maximise the exit potential. So clearly the value is there. And what you can see as well is that they’ve decarbonised their Scope 1 and 2 five times faster than listed equivalents.

So once you remove the noise and market volatility of the geopolitics and the environment which forces you when you’re on listed assets to make shorter-term arbitrage, and you’re focused on your medium to long-term value creation trajectory, this makes sense and no one can really tell us otherwise. When you look at the big numbers behind AI and energy needs, what makes more sense is to be deploying in what is the cheapest available energy capacity that doesn’t have, you know, production bottlenecks and that is by investing as well in, in your storage facilities, etc.. There are many cases to support a faster transition. And we might just need to reach the point where we realise that investing in decarbonisation is also investing in our industrial sovereignty, competitiveness and in the end, reaching a simultaneous stronger European position.

That’s really what we do see as shaping the markets in 2025 and going forward, like till in the next couple of years. This is a scenario which is unfolding despite the volatility we’ve seen in the market.

Final word: we have an investment gap in Europe towards our competitiveness and competitiveness for Europe also means decarbonisation, thankfully. If we were to allocate a third of the European savings which are currently held, you know, in savings accounts, we could bridge the gap identified by the Draghi Report as being the competitive gap towards finding a Europe which is more, let’s say, efficient. On that note, I’ll leave the floor to Jean-François for his final words.

Jean-François:

You said it all. I will just take a step back: we’ve been describing climate, climate change, sustainability issues as the biggest market failures of all time because markets are not pricing the negative externalities of non-sustainable activities.

And that’s precisely what we try to change: we are having more reporting, we are trying to create a regulatory framework to direct investment flows towards sustainable investments. So I think we have not addressed the market failure, but we are taking great steps towards starting to address it.

And this gives me most confidence about the future of sustainable finance. What are the key driver that gives me confidence are first of all, regulation: regulation is becoming clearer and more mature, and Europe is still very much a global reference point despite or, maybe thanks to the simplification exercise that’s taking place. And that’s very important because in all activities clear rules build trust.

The second big element that gives me confidence is investor demand. I have the opportunity to discuss with asset owners, you know, on almost a daily basis. And I can see and numbers back, that there’s still a very strong investor demand for sustainable investments. Also true at the retail level because globally at present, article eight and nine represent more than 50% of funds market, so that’s massive share of retail investment.

We also see, and maybe that’s a third point, a very strong momentum in thematic investing, so investment in themes such as energy transition, biodiversity. For biodiversity, with my French asset owners colleague, we launched two biodiversity funds, one focusing on equities, the other one on private equity. And when we launched the project, we thought, okay, maybe we’ll be raising, around €100 million for each of the two strategies. In the end, we’ve raised in excess of €400 million for two strategies. So there’s a strong appetite for sustainability and trying to go further in understanding how we can actually invest and support this sustainable outcomes in a clever way.

To conclude, I would say that sustainable finance is entering maybe a more difficult phase given the current context but also a more mature phase. And, so the clearer rules, the fact that there is real capital behind sustainability and the fact that we see more and more tangible results in terms of investment, for example renewable energy production capacity have increased massively in Europe and in other geographies such as China as well. So I think there’s a clear momentum. And this gives me a lot of confidence about the future for sustainable finance.

Jean-Paul:

We are ending with such positive messages from you, so thank you very much. Thank you for this very insightful discussion. It was really a pleasure to have you in our podcast, so Marie, Jean-François, again, thank you. And thank you everybody for listening.

Jean-François:

Thanks Jean-Paul.

Marie:

Thank you for having us.