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

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. Ron’s perspective was shaped in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where he watched a thriving neighborhood decline not because of its people but because mortgage support and investment disappeared. That experien...

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...

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 mana...

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 spen...

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 launc...

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 fou...

Return drivers in impact venture capital are changing fast. And today's guest Daniel Izzo is at the forefront of that shift. Daniel is the co-founder and CEO of Vox Capital Brazil’s first impact venture capital firm. He’s shown that mission-driven startups serving low-income populations can deliver both strong risk-adjusted returns (including a 40% IRR in one fund) and true social justice. In...

Blended finance is what makes the hardest deals in emerging markets investable. Nick O’Donohoe knows this better than most. As the former CEO of British International Investment, he helped deploy billions into infrastructure, healthcare, and manufacturing across Africa and South Asia, using capital structures others considered too risky. In this episode, Nick explains how BII used blended finance...

Stranded assets are turning up on balance sheets everywhere. And Mark Campanale saw the climate risk before anyone else did. As founder of Carbon Tracker, Mark helped expose how fossil fuel companies are valued on the assumption they’ll burn over $100 trillion worth of reserves… reserves that science says must largely stay in the ground. His team’s “Unburnable Carbon” report landed on desks at JP...

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. The firm manages over $80 billion across the full spectrum of alternatives, including private equity, infrastructure, real estate, and credit. Within that, Grosvenor oversees roughly $...

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...

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 inves...

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 prob...

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 questi...

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 matte...

What do an AI-powered investment engine, a grassroots organizing platform, and a nature-tech-focused VC have in common? They’re all built on the conviction that technology should be in service of real-world problems – not just market efficiency or shareholder return. And increasingly, investors are stepping up not only to fund that kind of innovation, but to actively shape it. In this 3-in-1 compi...

What does it look like when billion-dollar funds put impact at the core of their investment strategy? In this 3-in-1 compilation episode, we revisit conversations with investors managing tens of billions across public fixed income, public equities, private equity, and impact-focused real estate. Each one makes the case that environmental and social outcomes aren’t a tradeoff – but a source of last...

In this second compilation focused on emerging markets, we revisit conversations featuring three investors who are channeling substantial capital into regions where others hesitate to go – and they’re doing it with discipline, innovation, and deep local insight. Each of these guests brings a different strategy and perspective, but all are working toward the same goal: building sustainable, scalabl...

The mainstream investment community has long viewed emerging and frontier markets as high-risk regions fraught with numerous challenges. However, with growing populations and expanding digital access, these regions are poised to become the economic powerhouses of the future. In this compilation episode, we revisit 3 past conversations from Eliza Foo, Asha Mehta, and Monica Brand Engel, who are lev...

Sustainability is increasingly shaping how value is created in real estate. In logistics, regulation, tenant requirements, and execution have become central to investment outcomes. My guest today is Vojkan Brankovic, founder of Apeiron Capital Partners. Apeiron’s strategy centers on acquiring older logistics buildings and upgrading them into sustainable, institutional-grade assets. Apeiron has tra...

In May, I spoke with four leaders who are reshaping what finance can do – and who it can serve. In this compilation episode, I’ve pulled together the most powerful ideas, turning points, and takeaways from those conversations. If something resonates, you can dive deeper – the links to each full episode are below. Here's the list of featured guests: Nasir Qadree, Founder and Managing Partner o...

Impact investing only works when economics and impact reinforce each other, a holy grail Mark Hays has been chasing through years of sustainable investing work. Mark is Director of Sustainable and Impact Investing at Glenmede, where he works with families and institutions to align portfolios with measurable impact while meeting financial goals. His career spans Cambridge Associates, OMERS, Flat Wo...

In private equity, emerging markets surface underwriting risk in ways developed markets often don’t. This episode looks at how being intentional at entry shapes what gets backed, how companies hold up in shocks, and how impact is measured over time. My guest Sugandhi Matta has spent two decades inside private equity across Asia, from Temasek to Actis, before becoming a founding partner and Chief I...

In emerging markets, private debt is often structured for scale or collateral, leaving a missing middle of companies that hold local economies together without appropriate growth capital. These are companies that are too big for microfinance and still too small for traditional investment and impact capital. They already have revenues and cash flow, but lack collateral and operate in markets with l...

This spring, I had the chance to talk with four incredible guests, each with a different take on what it really means to put money to work and invest in line with your values. Across late March and April, we explored climate-smart timber, social finance powered by dormant bank accounts, fully impact-focused wealth advising, and how catalytic capital is reaching places most firms won’t go. Here are...