STEVE ROCCO - THE SDGS AS A STRATEGIC LENS FOR INVESTMENT

Today, the world faces a series of challenges that left unresolved will lead to a socially and environmentally unstable planet.  Shifting the world’s economy to a more sustainable basis will require a collective effort by business, government, civil society, and capital. In the northern hemisphere, we are making remarkable progress but in the southern hemisphere, lack of capital is one of the key obstacles. A “business as usual approach” has resulted in only 10% of the global assets under management being deployed in Africa (3%), the Middle East (2%), and South America (5%) combined.  Climate change, inequality, and more recently Covid-19 have only highlighted our systems’ weaknesses.

At the same time, ESG and impact investment are quickly becoming mainstream. Investor demand will only continue to grow in the future further pushing this transition. New EU regulation on the labeling of financial products is further fuelled by this shift.

In our work with the SDG Lab at the UN in Geneva, we were given the mandate to find a better way to use the SDGs to help bridge the gap between capital and emerging markets. We are proposing using the SDGs as a strategic lens for investors to increase their allocation to emerging markets.

In our webinar Steve Rocco, Managing Director at The Ground Up Project, will discuss the following questions:

• New demand? The new EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulations (SFDR)
• How can investors comply with new regulations and be more strategic in their allocations?
• What is the role of the SDGs in this shift? The SDGs as a roadmap
• How can this lead to better measurement of impact and lower risk?

Steve brings more than 20 years of experience across a wide range of finance including traditional capital markets, SME finance, and impact investing.  With the Ground Up Project, Steve is part of the team executing the Pipeline Builder project in partnership with the SDG Lab at the UN in Geneva. Prior to this, he worked for MainStreet Partners in London in the Swiss market.  Steve was the finance director for Byfusion, a smart waste technology startup which was owned a patented process that converts plastic waste into a 100% recycled building material.  Upon moving to Switzerland, Steve worked for Geneva Capital, an advisory boutique based in Geneva specializing in ESG investment and impact investment. In New York, Steve co-founded Mission Markets, a capital-raising platform in impact.  He was on the investment team with the Media Development Investment Fund, a mission-driven investment fund in New York. He also spent 7 years in institutional equities and fixed income sales with Bank of America, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs.  Prior to graduate school, Steve worked in micro-finance with FINCA International in Washington, DC, and Ecuador.

The Pipeline Builder

The Pipeline Builder project, a collaboration between Ground Up Project and the SDG Lab at the UN in Geneva with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), is trying to understand and solve these problems. Our mandate was to develop a model that fits how investors operate today using the SDGs as a roadmap. Our investment criteria were emerging markets SMEs across sectors that aligned strongly with the SDGs. We were guided by risk, returns, and impact, the basis of impact investing. Other considerations were some of the often-cited challenges of small-scale investments; lack of deal flow, high transaction costs, and small-scale deal size.