Good evening everyone well or good afternoon or
good morning depending on where are you right now uh we are delighted because we have friends
joining from milan and rome of course but we got other friends from washington dc from
kigali from madrid from paris from canada so i guess these are the advantages of technology
we miss the good old days when we used to meet in person but well everything has advantages
and disadvantages and that you know we just by switching language into english we can have many
more friends so welcome everyone uh um in this difficult times when the covet 19 crisis threatens
to give all of keep all of us in a reactive mode we at vcci inclusive finance and forum
finance sustainability are seeking dialogue we are trying to assemble ideas that can turn
into visions for a more resilient inclusive and sustainable next normal a future built in part
by the innovations impact investors will pioneer and for this reason we have invited bertrand madre
to join us today bertrand thank you very much i can't express with words how thankful we are how
honored and how delighted we are to host you today uh if you don't mind prior to introducing you and
who you are to our friends i would like to thank our sponsors credit mutuel investment managers and
exxon asset management for not only for allowing us to have this three-part impact investing
series but most importantly for your support over the years i mean without you both it
would have been impossible so thank you simonetta thank you vansan thank you really um
i wanted to say thank you to federica viviana vanessa and maria luisa as well for all the work
done behind the scenes and as most of you know these three-part series are the result of a
partnership between bcci inclusive finance which belongs to the british chamber of commerce
for italy and that's why the acronym bcci and forum finance sustainability which is
the italian sustainable investment forum and for that reason i would love simonetta and
francesco to say a few words to say hello to you simonetta is my acquired sister the co-chair of
bcci inclusive finance and the head in italy of credit mutual investment managers prego simonetta
and good evening good morning good afternoon it's a pleasure also for me to welcome
everyone for being here with us with us today i'm very pleased to welcome those of you that have
been with us for a long time now as well as those are new to this group because there are new people
in this in this group so it's important to welcome everybody and before to leave the the the floor to
francesco and paulie and bertrand i would like to to have just a few seconds just to say which
is um our our mission when we we we started and uh and in our mission we would
like to redesign the role of capital in in society by building a new future in which
finance is instrumental to social progress sustainability challenges as poverty climate
change gender gap need a profound system transformation and a deep personal renewal our
personal contribution is necessary more than ever so we hope today this event inspires
ideas and discussions around the ways that we can make our world a better place where
to live so uh i thank you again uh and all of you today to to be part of this gen journey with
us and now i live the floor to francesco thank you thank you thank you paulie thank you
bertram i'm really really keen to welcome bertram today and being a part of bcci in the organization
of this event and special thanks of course to paulie to promote this uh this initiative
so few words of 30 seconds 35 seconds maybe so first of all one issue that i'm very
very happy that this year is 20 years of from the foundation of sustainable forum
and sustainable finance forum in italy and which is quite important we are not more pioneer
now sustainable finances mainstream as you know just a couple of things is the first
one is the responsibility the keywords for us is a responsibility i think that
all the stakeholders today have to be more responsible so we are talking about
asset manager bank insurance companies banking foundation pension funds everybody have to
be a crucial rule i mean that sustainable finance or finance is not a neutral tool it is at the
center of the debate on sustainable development so this is the issue that may that mark a difference
between what was the model of finance before so the other issue the the other issue is that
social and economic emergency from one side and climate emergency from the other side they
are the two sides of the same coin this is the issue i mean that we have to pay attention
to say okay we cannot deal with the matter of climate change because we have the other urgency
now we have to we have to to push for the recovery et cetera no as european commission underlying
that we are talking about the same problem and if you deal with this with the with the climate
change issue you absolutely have to to to face the social and economic opportunities that
can can come from a change of paradigm so for for me is quite important so just just to
conclude saying that okay we have to work together paulie knows very well that i insist
in this kind of public and private approach i mean that we have to work together
and we have to to look for an alignment towards the same goals sustainable development
goals this okay i give you the floor thank you francesco thank you francesco
finance it's not a neutral tool indeed and i'm sure that bertrand fully agrees with what
you just said um also because i've read his book and the many many articles he publishes in project
syndicate and i know for certain that that's the case thank you francesco thank you simonetta
so to our friends um ladies and gentlemen i am very very happy to introduce that from madrid to
you bertrand is ceo and founder of blue like an orange sustainable capital an impact investing
fund created to provide financial returns while mobilizing capital for projects useful to humanity
prior to that bertrand has had an illustrious career in both public and private finance he was
former economic advisor to president shirak cfo of credit agriculture associated general and
managing director and cfo of the world bank i have to say that in this last role he
co-authored a report called from billions to trillions which is considered a key
publication in the world of sustainable finance he is also the author of two books on how finance
should be leveraged to build a better world so this leads me to the first question bertrand
unfortunately i am still waiting for the english translation of your second book bulong new series
changes i'm sorry for my french so please if you don't mind let's concentrate on can finance
save the world bertrand in this wonderful book you look at the destructive role finance played
during the 2007-2008 economic crisis but most importantly you provide a compelling vision of how
finance can be a force for good would you please make a summary of your main message for our
friends thank you sure thank you thank you uh very much paulie it's great to to meet
you simonetta and francesco and uh why we get used to this virtual gathering it's
still very frustrating to be like speaking to your screen uh but thank you thank you
so much so now the main message is pretty straightforward actually we we had
a massive uh crisis uh 10 years ago which has been felt all over the
world particularly in europe actually and uh to address that deep crisis we've done a
lot of things actually we should not just forget about that but we focused on the technical
aspects of the repair so we we asked the banks to increase their solvency ratio we
asked the banks to work on their liquidity we provided a little bit more security in the
insurance and pension fund regulation system in a nutshell we patched up the system but we did not
really work on the design of that system and not on the fault lines that have been revealed by that
crisis and there were a number of fault lines in particular because the uh the system as we knew
it was uh basically is a baby of decisions made in the early 70s and let me take two very
important dates uh which i i don't want to say they are bad or wrong i don't want to say
that we move from like being in the dark to being the light and then again in the dark but
they are important symbols the first one is uh august 71 15th of august 71 when president nixon
made the decision to temporarily suspend as a convertibility of dollar into gold i mean it's 50
years and we are still under this temporary regime this was the time when an ounce of gold was worth
35 i mean as you know it's worth a little bit more today and it shows what happened in the last 50
years so it's interesting per se because we have moved with that from a world which was organized
around the dollar with the watchdog being the imf and at that time everything was kind of fixed
and sometimes you kind of changed the fixed link which was called devaluation and uh now
we moved into a floating mechanism which more than the floating mechanism is is a mechanics
where market is really the default value setter if i ask you how much is a dollar you will
tell me a dollar is worth x euro i say okay good point so how much is a euro and you will tell
me it's first y dollars and it's moving every day so again it's not bad or wrong it's just the fact
that market has has really entered our daily life and for those of you which i think is the majority
online which are working with finance you know what i mean with accounting principles called mart
market this is really where it's coming from and and few few months before another very important
moment was an article by the great professor of economics milton friedman who published in the
13th of september 1917 the new york times a very famous paper in which uh it provided an
answer to a big discussion that happened in the u.s at that time it was about general motors
general motors was the largest company in the u.s it was a time when people say what is good for
general motors is good for america and what is good for america is good for general motors and
general motors was considering to open its board its governance to three board members which would
represent what was then called the public interest something different and of course milton friedman
stepped up published his paper which was called the purpose of business is to increase its profits
so of course the the paper itself was a little bit more sophisticated uh in particular it reminded
people that public interest was supposed to be taken care of by governments public authorities
each of us etc and that ceos and companies were supposed to to be part of that ecosystem but we've
kind of forgotten all the rest and we focused on increasing profits and so when you combine
market uh predominance with a profit uh access then you enter in what has become the conservative
revolution the washington consensus the neoliberal model etc which has worked actually pretty well
for a while but which has hit its limits in 2007 and we've not really addressed that the questions
is this model still okay for what we want to achieve now so that's that comes to my point so we
we've uh we've kind of patched up the system so we we are not dead today which is good we are not
in 1913 or 1940.
We avoided that but it was true before covered in even more true today after covid
we have not addressed the fault line so we we did a try in 2015 when when we worked you thank you
for mentioning the billions to trillions report when we work on the sustainable development goals
when we work on financing for development in addis and when we work on paris cop21 agreement on
climate so we design the roadmap but you did not really work on the underlying financing models
it is necessary to get there and we were off track before kovid we are still off track after a
career and that's why it's extremely timely that we have this conversation today if we seriously
want to change the world there is more to do we totally agree beltran but thank you for this
high level explanation we are fascinated by you know your your life basically
everything um the second question uh in the second question i would like um
to discuss the role of private finance in helping companies truly pursue the triple
bottom line so in building what everybody calls stakeholder capitalism because it seems easier
said than done and why do i say that because in our market economy the corporation is a very
important social and economic agent especially if we think of the limited resources of govern the
fiscal burdens of governments and the limited resources of the nonprofit sector if we could make
our corporations accountable for a deeper purpose we would have a better capitalism a
more prosperous capitalism for everyone and for the planet making our companies
accountable for a deeper purpose may sound utopian but this was often the case between world war ii
and the 1970s and it's exactly what you say from the 17th on things changed a little bit and
i recently read the report a 1953 report from general electric's ceo and he was publishing
results but he was bragging about a lot of money paid in federal taxes and payments to suppliers
payroll spending for employees long-term research and he quoted something like the the income of the
firm is shared among those who make it possible obviously blacktran these are the businesses
we want uh but to have them we need what you would you always say in in the book finance to
be a good servant and not a master the thing is that while today while business leaders may
aspire to virtue they are bound by a fiduciary duty to maximize profits and sometimes they feel
they they they find conflicting demands while stakeholders ask them to do good but shareholders
request constant profit maximization even quarterly so the question is with the average
stock currently held for just a few months versus in the 1960s for a few years with our
beloved discounted cash flow model not valuing income into the future much and with quarterly
results still triggering investment decisions how can we reverse the tide on short-term medium
how can we allow business leaders to truly truly pursue the triple bottom line well i think you
you you raise uh the question uh and there are two things that we can we can envisage first what can
we do within uh the system that is existing today and again there are a lot of things that can be
done so we should not just be shy and say it's not me it's a system uh also let me share with you uh
the most uh how can i say that the most heartful anecdote of this period into in early 2008 we
organized in paris a seminar on the subprime crisis it was before the bankruptcy of lehman
brothers so at the very beginning of the crisis and we had invited paul volcker paul verker which
was the head of the federal reserve under jimmy carter the guy that defeated inflation so the
central banker with a capital c and his capital b and then he was he was called back from his
retirement by president obama to help him design the so-called vocal rule to prevent banks from
speculating on markets basically and investing their own balance sheet into speculative assets
and i remember paul vodka was asked by somebody in the audience say but mr walker why are you
criticizing us why are you criticizing wall street at the end of the day we are just doing our job
and so the rules are the worst and we just abide by the rules and volcker told them guys i mean
this is just not reasonable you're very well paid he was very smart you're graduating from the best
universities you cannot pretend you don't know and he said which was i mean like a punch in my
stomach he said i will not accept in 2008 no no no more than i would accept in 1945 it's a excuse
of new hamburg you just cannot say you don't know so you you are part of a system you just can't
accept it as it is and that leads me to my second point so while we can do things within the
system we should also work on changing the system and the system as we know it as i said it has
a genealogy it has a burst i mean the early 70s that's the way we started to really work on the
accounting standards the remuneration policy i mean the stock options for instance uh lnt
for instance the fiduciary duties the way rating agencies are working i mean everything which makes
your daily life my daily life what it is today and this this is a cycle and friedman actually
said when the previous system died mine was ready so now we have to work to make ready
the next system and that's really uh what we all have to do on the one hand uh
to do the maximum within the existing rules and the other end try to adjust these rules
for the future and that's where the tension is and it's it's it's a difficult exercise
it's a difficult exercise but we can't hide ourselves behind the rules and say we can't do
nothing the the weakness of this is that today uh the system relies a lot on the goodwill of
individuals goodwill of ceos goodwill of president of organization goodwill of individual consumers
investors staff members etc they can push and we all push and there are things happening so we
should not be totally depressed there are things happening but if we want this to move to the next
stage we have to basically open the open the hood take our toolbox and work on the engine i mean
it's really working on the operating system and let me quote a guy that i admire a lot a guy
named colleen meyer uh he was a former dean of the state business school in oxford he published
a book two or three years ago called prosperity and in his book he says the social purpose of
business should not be to increase its profits so profit should not be an end to an end a
nan in itself a profit actually as i would say is that it's not an ending to an end it's an
imperative you need to be profitable to survive but the profit is an outcome and the profit is
calculated based on norms what are our norms on revenues what are norms and costs what do we
incorporate in our p l so again we understand the concept of profit but there are many ways
to calculate the concept of profits and then performance so what colleen meyer is suggesting
based on this type of idea is that the social purpose of business should not as i say be to
increase its profits full stop the social purpose of business should be to find profitable solution
to the problem of this planet and its people every word is important we have to find profitable
solution profit is an is a means to an end not an earning itself and because we are
profitable that why you you can be rewarded and this profitability make sure that there is
a something useful which will last over time and that's how you put profit in something bigger than
it is and that's a real change and you say for this planet and these people because i mean there
is no point of making profit if it doesn't benefit us at the end of the earth collectively as people
and us collectively as people on a given planet maybe elon musk will send us to mars soon so in
that case we might say to the people of these planets but for the time being we're stuck on
this planet and so we better do the best out of it thank you thank you that was a good
one and and volker was not the only central banker who was called
on retirement to solve but mario i try not to interfere in other countries policy it reminded me to drag it but yes work on the
engine and this leads me to to the next question of how to how can we come up with appropriate
instead of excessive regulation i.e the role of governments in in building back differently uh
because while it's true that the kuwait 19 crisis is highlighting many countries systemic weaknesses
and inequalities but perhaps is also providing policy makers a once in a generation opportunity
to tackle them differently the thing is that some argue bertrand that fiscal spending is the only
game in town because um central banks have many few bullets left um that governments should play
a bigger role ensuring obviously universal access to healthcare education digital technologies but
a bigger role that governments that we realize today that governments can even borrow more than
we thought without upsetting financial markets but others have a completely different vision and
they think governments should simply set up the frameworks and the incentives so that the private
sector can come and help and take a leadership role the other day i um i read mark carney on
the financial times and and he was on policy he was quoting three f's quite easy to remember
fiscal spending framing regulatory initiatives and finance so what do you think bertrand how can
we strike the right balance well i i i think he's right first of all it's time for the pendulum
to swing back to something more central uh we we've moved from from a moment where
ronald reagan in his inaugural address says the government is not the solution the government
is a problem and so we moved away from government now with the covid i mean everything is government
related so i think we should realize what i said before i'm repeating today that none of the
problem connected to the sustainable development goals can be addressed by the government or the
private sector or civil society alone so we need to move to a place where everybody is paying his
role but you have a governance of these issues which which coordinates the relationship
between public private and civil society and it's a hard it's a hard day because there is
a lot of suspicion one of the consequence of the many crises we've been swoon and this one is also
i mean as you see in many countries a distrust is is the name of the game this trust wizard
refinance visa with politicians with every science of israeli technology vis-a-vis elites
in general we have this issue and without trust it's very difficult to cooperate on top of
that we don't have that many people that can speak different languages you know
we are in a world which maybe it's a it's a legacy of taylor where everybody is
swimming in his lane or running in his corridor and not understand the problems of others but you
will not address poverty water climate cyber just you alone even not the biggest country on
earth cannot address these questions alone so we have to we learn cooperation we have to
speak different languages we have to be bilingual because if not i mean suspicion will be the
name of the game and it's it will be a complete disaster so for me it's essential that we in
particular in europe where we have this tradition of public private cooperation i think this is
where we should reinvent this type of tools when i wanted to be provocative after the brexit
uh you know everybody maybe a little less milan but in particular there was a big fight between
amsterdam frankfurt dublin and paris to get the uh whatever could be taken out of london out of the
city of london and so the people try to attract you know bankers and mla bankers and traders etc
i say okay that's fine it's the name of the game but the real question is not to try to copy
or emulate london i mean none of us is capable of doing that i mean they are different in
nature and none of us have the british empire none of us has english language none of us has a
connection with the middle east and the far east and so on it's very difficult to reinvent that i
mean we are not the brits at the end of the day sorry for the bci but that's uh another i mean
it and i have profound respect for that so it was a good question would not have been to say
how can we take a piece of the beast but what is a financial center for the 21st century and i think
the europeans should have worked together instead of competing you know one against the other and
say okay what do we need to bring to the world to make a difference and i think the main the main
issues is we could be the place where we discuss climate transition where we discuss demographic
transition we are aging what does it mean in terms of uh credit and savings for instance and i
mean public private cooperation can we develop new types of finance can we can we be the place where
we really invent the tools for blended finance for joint uh cooperation etc that would make a
difference can we engage in a more forceful way with the emerging markets in africa i mean we keep
saying hey we have a crime with africa okay what do we do with that we know that today you have
1.5 billion africans and 500 million europeans at the end of this century you will have 4 billion
africans and less than 500 million europeans so if we don't take care of them
now if we don't work with them now we have a problem so now is the time to to to
discuss a different finance not just a copycat a model that we will i don't think we'll
ever be able to copy at the end of the day thank you bertrand and this is a great idea
because we're not number one in technology we're not number one in many many topics
but i we can say and we can tell that we are number one in sustainability with a green
deal and so absolutely i absolutely agree um i'm skipping one question because i want
us to have time to discuss impact investing so i'm going to go into what was my question
five which is finance and the journey to itaca and putin victor rubel bertrand nothing is
more powerful than an idea whose time has come and for the asset management industry the time
for integrating sustainability criteria into investment decision making has definitely come the
idea might be as old as investing itself because we can think of the quakers and the methodists
um refusing to invest in slaves we can't think of investors opposing nuclear arms or during
the vietnam war and fighting racism against south africa's apartheid last last century
but i see a kind of evolution from doing less harm to doing more good from exclusions all the way
into impact investing into providing solutions with the capital employed now you've written
uh articles with sir ronald cohen which is another person i deeply deeply admire and ronald
cohen as you know has a vision of the fact that the 19th century was the century of returns the
20th century we added a new dimension and we learned how to manage risk so we turn it into two
dimensions risk and return and you know he always says that this is this will be the century of
of risk return and impact of the famous three dimensions um i mean we hope it's true but we also
know that impact investing is facing a bit of some challenges in terms of trust accountability how
to measure manage and report on impacts which i'm sure you are experiencing because it's not that
straightforward we haven't done it for the last 300 years so what is your vision about it how
are you seeing finance in 20 50 100 years time well i think it's thank you for for raising
this companionship with us cerrone curran actually and you might have noted that this
evolution from 19th century 21st century from risk to risk return to risk return on impact
is really something i discussed with him many years ago actually we came to that vision and it's
very interesting because emmanuel macron i don't know whether he's still popular or unpopular in
italy but whatever he's a friend and he he was kind enough to to write the forward of my book
and that's precisely the point he's highlighting he says this is it uh maybe because he was a
banker as hotshot before you know it says a lot but but i think it's important he he really
points at the finger at the important issue which is our models because at the end
of the day this is the way we calculate things and if we don't change our models we don't change
the way we look at things as we very well know the way we measure the way we calculate means a lot
on the way we do or don't do things and and i think this is precisely this moment in time and
ronald cohen has been a force in that direction to say we need to work i mean at the end of the
day irr is a very sophisticated analysis i mean we made it very simple so you say oh it's an irr
of 8.5 but there is a lot of assumptions behind this there is a lot of things so we can make it
a little bit more sophisticated by taking on more climate nature the cost of living peaceful in
society and these type of things there's nothing that prevent us from doing that and that's i
think the fight of the coming of the coming years i think it's it's extremely uh promising that
things are moving uh but uh i i i don't think we're there yet uh again i don't want to be too
complacent too early and we all of us today we we have the thing that things are changing fast
because we are all in the same fish tank so we all talk to people with things the same and so you
have it's a cognitive bias that is very well known i mean talking to people you know we are today
maybe we are the kind of impact fox news network we are together watching impact but i have no
idea whether we are a tiny aquarium in a big ocean or whether we are big aquarium and then we
are about to kind of cover the whole ocean so we we should really pay attention to
that and that's why i think working hard on the underlying system not that i'm a marxist
but i believe infrastructure means a lot that you need to work on things that makes
your life a routine the objective is not only to make the impact approach a mainstream but
a routine something which is just so embedded in our way of doing that nobody questioned it
anymore today we are at this moment where as you say there is a growing momentum there is a
tidal wave uh but it's still ambiguous you have things happening so everybody says great you have
40 or 50 trillion dollar or euro invested in esg well that's probably true but let's
face it i mean what is exactly esg in a number of cases people are very
genuine and sincere and go fast and deep fair enough and that's not my job to test
with with the same room whether they are telling the truth or not i'm not in that
business so i'm taking things at face value but we have to be cautious i mean again esg
is as big as lawyers would say it's the best effort things i'm trying to commit to do good
things it's a good starting point and i think it's a good point to socialize these ideas
but we have to go further down the road and for me again i don't want to be a grand priest
of impact or an impact mayor or whatever you call it but i think it goes beyond it's not just
about best efforts it's about outcome it's about measurement it's about third party verification as
we say there is a trust issue in the system it's not just because you say i'm going to do great
things that people will buy this hundred percent uh and that's where the title of my last book
comes from do we seriously want to change the world of course the important word is serious
seriously everybody say yes i want to do big things i mean i had this conversation with one
of my friends after davos discussion after davos week and we were both back and my friend told
me oh it's great when you come back from davos all the world's problems are solved if you add
up all the commitments we are done it's okay and then you come back the year after and oh
my god the principal not sold what happened yeah because if we are not serious if it's just
about verbal commitment some are genuine some are less genuine some are pure washing some are pure
marketing so that's this moment that we have to create and basically push people to stop thinking
about this make it happen and that's where we have to find the relevant forces to go in the right
direction we have the we have the roadmap i mean the sustainable development goes our roadmap it's
not ideal for sure it's complex it's it's mostly addressing public sectors perspectives and issues
etc but let's be realistic there will be no discussion at the global level to agree today
on something else so let's stick to that let's stick to the paris climate agreement let's stick
to what's going to be discussed on nature and biodiversity and try to make the best out of it
and that's really where our efforts should be focused in the coming years thank you returned
um i i there's there's a sentence you mentioned that uh it struck me which is it's not just
about efforts it's about results and third-party verification to build trust and and you're totally
right because if investors see that the biggest 10 esg fans in the world are all investing invested
like their biggest holdings are amazon facebook uh and and all these big you know fun stocks then
the trust in sustainable finance diminishes so it is very important and work on
infrastructure as as you rightly said would you please now tell our friends about
blue like an orange sustainable capital which type of financial returns are you targeting
with social and environmental outcomes as well and and if you're targeting um some sdgs as
opposed to others tell us about this wonderful product yeah so there are things i can share and
things i cannot share for regulatory purposes and i'm not supposed to talk about performance online
this is prohibited as most of you know i suppose but in principle there are few ingredients
to to the blue like an orange sauce uh which basically uh came out of the book that you you
just showed i spent a year after the world bank in a think tank thinking what how can we really
mobilize this billions to get to the trillions again just to put things in perspective uh most
people talk about gdp and they say yeah gdp x gdp y and then you say okay what is the gdp of italy
what is the gdp of the world what is the gdp of the eu and then you realize that 95 of the people
have no clue they talk about it but they forget and i like to remind people that gdp of the world
depending on how you measure it and though there are different ways to measure it is around 80
to 100 trillion dollars so it's a lot of zeros and then when you put in perspective the money
transferred to support emerging neural economies it's in billions so how do you move from these
billions to the trillions how do you breed the gap and the gap will be reached partly by public
money as you discuss fiscal policy public aid etc but the gap will be bridged by private money and
that's what we need to organize to make sure that uh let me share an anecdote with you when we're
still at the world bank we are meeting in 2015 with with the u.n delegate delegation but mostly
from the general assembly so ambassadors etc and uh so we are they came to the world bank
to discuss the financing of the sdg and they say yeah metro you come from the private sector
you're a finance guy so how do we finance this and one of the guys i was i was stunned
because i couldn't believe my ears he said oh it's great we will ask qatar in norway
because they are very rich to give us the money to finances and i say it doesn't
make any sense i would not ask them money and what the money is given is lost and on top of
that it's not at the scale even if it's rich in a hundred trillion dollar economy even the trillion
of norwegian euro would not make a difference so this is not the right way to get there the
right way is to organize a system through which investments public and private will flow
to where it's needed instead of buying negative rates french german swiss japanese
belgian bonds not yet italian coming closer you should invest a little bit of your money uh
where there is growth and needs okay it's riskier that's true but let's work on that and how can
we make a difference so it was a real it's still actually an allocation of capital issues that
we are facing too much money going in places where it's not needed and too little going where
it's needed and so the rooney can orange can out of this diagnosis so first we need to find a
way to channel money where it's most needed including economically i'm not talking
about charitable money i'm talking about investment opportunities second we need to work
with the system as it is today and the system as it is today means that for a pension fund an
insurance company a sovereign wealth fund etc they have fiduciary duties they have to
be paid for the risks they are taking full stop and you cannot play with that i remember
a conversation with a pension from a guy who said you know better i cannot tell my guys that they
will make less money on earth in order to be rewarded in heaven it might be working i mean
when you're very wealthy and you have your own family office you can do whatever you want with
your money but if you manage other people's money you can't do that so to come back on your point on
performance we target commercial returns because this is it full stop and we don't even question it
and second of course we add an impact perspective to that and that's critical and to get there we
have developed our own impact rating mechanics which we have called sdg blue it's an impact
rating the way you have credit trading the idea is the way you can compare the credit trading of a
country of a sovereign issuer to the credit rating of international organizations the credit rating
of a bank to the credit rating of a corporate etc we wanted to be able to compare the impact rating
of a dollar the impact value of a dollar invested in a project in education to a dollar invested
in project b in health etc even if educationals are different and so we put our system together
so first of all financial returns second impact rating measurements we have partnered with the
inter-american development bank and it's very important that we have this public private
cooperation i mentioned earlier so it's it's a important part fourth we have been backed by by
a number of individuals which believe that now is the time to to see finance a little differently
people like a strong voice like paul paulman for instance or emmanuel faber in france we had
some trouble in the past few weeks and others and so this is this combination of impact trading
system individuals supporting the idea and opening doors on the ground uh the partnership is a
public institution and very strict on finance and impact this is what it means so we started
with a private credit fund in latin america we've closed it last year we're investing it
and we continue now we've passed i think there's a viability threshold so now we will continue
and the idea is to roll this model in different continents etc but that's that's really where
we're coming from where do we invest i mean projects which are mostly mid-sized companies a
little bit of infrastructure mid-sized companies the investments we have made
which are public are in health in access to uh to finance in
infrastructure so it's very diverse but it's it's connected to the
sustainable development goals framework it's really an and the vast majority of our
lp investors are institutional investors okay okay how interesting and you mentioned that
you started in south america and i perfectly knew that with in partnership with the inter-american
development bank but you said you intend to move into other geographic areas in future yeah if i if
i project myself five years or ten years down the road uh i'm convinced that blue like and orange
will i my dream is for brewer is to to be one of the go-to place if you want to to have uh to make
impact in emerging and developing economies so i'd like to be present in latin america in africa and
in asia but you know you have to do once at a time uh i move from being a big organization to being
a small entrepreneur with my partners and uh so it takes time you have to learn patience of course
of course of course but i'm very glad you're it's working that's a the good news is that we
we've passed all these moments right now i mean i i see the future and i'm not supposed to say that
but very happy to need to take any calls offline sorry sorry when i when i asked financial returns
i meant you know above market returns below market returns no no i wasn't i wasn't willing i mean
i'm very happy to comment offline on this and i i have precise answer to all of this but i'm not
allowed by my regulation to to do this type of marketing statement now of course of course of
course absolutely absolutely um so we've got a question from the audience but um since we we
are perfect in time um i would like to i'm gonna ask you that question later i would like to play
a game with you bertrand this is a sword q a where if you don't mind you provide short
spontaneous answers that's very scary so if if i say a or b you can still say c you
don't have to choose either one or the other but i have a wild card like in geopody as you know exactly exactly totally totally i'm not going
to say paris saint-germain or ac milan no no no i know the answer the first question to
you is would more women in leadership roles lead to better social environmental and
economic outcomes actually that's a good question because i'm working with a good friend
on a book on this on a female leadership what i strongly believe in is that from a leadership
perspective there are not that many differences and uh or they are cultural
and they are you know uh what for me is extremely important is uh the
mixing it's a big city you have men and women yeah i i don't like places where you are 90 of women i
don't like places where you have 90 percent of men and so i think to have a reasonable equilibrium 70
30 60 40 is about right and i remember i said that uh i know creditor recall is is a tough topic
in italy these days with the offer on credible but when i was cfo we had this monthly discussion
with the cardiac recon team and which are the 39 presidents and 39 ceos of regional banks and at
that time out of the 78 people for some others you had like three or four women and i remember
i said once i think the atmosphere would be a little different instead of three we had 30.
And
see it made a lot of progress so it's moving the right direction so for me the key is equilibrium
thank you very much should central banks continue using corporate bonds and bank loans of high
carbon emitting companies as collateral albertan i don't think so or at least they should start
having a real policy on that i i know christine nagar as part of his strategic review is moving
in that direction there are a lot of debate here uh i i remember when ten years ago or
yes or six or seven years ago i spoke to a former head of the ecb you can try to imagine
which one and uh i see well you i mean there is an international agreement on on climate
so it's not just that you make up your mind i mean your shareholders have signed a paper in
which they say they support this so why don't you go big on on green finance and buy assets
which are related to that and remember the guys say yeah green and why not blue red or yellow or
purple i see well it's a big difference there is no purple agreement there is a green argument and
and now they've moved in that direction so i think of course all these shifts are difficult i mean
there are a lot of constraints but i definitely support the idea of being consistent
john maynard keynes or milton friedman the truth that i just finished a biography of john
maynard keynes so i didn't know the guy i had read his books when i was in school and i'm fascinated
by the guy much more because i'm fascinated by freeman freeman actually uh i mean he influenced
when i was in school et cetera but really the uh cancer is an amazing personality because he
was much he wasn't an economist by background he became an economist but but he targeted the
prosperity of a democratic system et cetera so i i really would say fell in love but i i i really
felt that this i if i had somebody to meet today and go on vacation with it would be case yes not
necessarily what people have done with skates after he died but with a personality for sure yeah
yeah i i didn't read the book but i listened to an entire podcast on keynes and there's so much we
don't know about this oh we had an amazing life amazing your favorite and you don't just
you understand that i love anecdotes and i have a daughter whom you met actually
she's studying in balcony in milan so i have a vested interest in italy and uh before
she she left for italy i took her on a trip uh just the two of us that dad and daughter
uh in the north east maine and new hampshire in in june 2018 and we went to bretonwoods this
is a famous place where basically we created the bretton woods order the imf the world bank xr
where keynes and his u.s counterpart discuss the future of the world and i remember because
it was more or less at the moment where the g7 in canada collapsed with trump refusing
to sign the argument and uh i sent a note to my friend i was participating to the g7 and i
told him i was my daughter where everything started i hope you're not where everything uh
not at the place where everything is ending and i had an episode for kane someday well
i'm glad we know we have a new president okay okay interesting interesting your favorite head of government ever today or
you know a past head of government that's a tough one uh i i think one of the
the life i found the most fascinating although i'm not sure i would go on
vacation with miss churchill uh i i think these guys has made amazing
things has made amazing mistakes he's typical larger than life person a little
bit like the two reservoirs in the us or the goal in france so so i i don't know i mean
i'm fascinated by these people which have emerged in particular circumstances which might have been
nobody if nothing had happened and that become as you said with victory i mean when you
see the moment you know if there had not been any uh second world war neither the
gold nor churchill would be known today totally totally your favorite spiritual
leader well i like pope francis a lot i had the privilege actually to see him from close and in particular when he
explained to a small group of people what he meant with the globalization of indifference
and the necessity to fight against it i must also say that i had an enormous privilege to have
a private visit at the vatican under john paul ii and i remember we were asked to be that 5 a.m
in the morning or something some of you probably have had this experience and then you you are
accompanied by a swiss guard to the private chapel of the holy father and then we entered we were
with a few friends and you entered the room and i remember it was in late 1990s so he was already
pretty tired and i saw this person from behind and i i really had the thing is he was carrying
the the pain of the world i don't know how to characterize this but i say wow this guy every
morning is praying for all of us and you felt something in the room and so these two moments
have been quite extraordinary uh for me so i am i am biased because i'm catholic and i have
the privilege to to me two of the most powerful voices uh but that's uh that's it amazing amazing
look i've got other questions but i'm wrong sorry i cannot no no okay let's try to to make them very
short because we've got three questions from the public it's fascinating but i would listen to
you for hours but i don't want to take more time the alternative to neoliberalism one word
impact have we reached the tipping point on global awareness on sustainability issues and i am
referring to gladwell's tipping point yes or no no meaningful change equals innovation plus social
commitment plus at whatever you want to the formula plus impactful finance what else would
you add to the well-known essentials of happiness nurture personal relationships do work
that's meaningful want less fare less so i didn't understand happiness normally would
they say spiritual leaders such as francis but the dalai lama well normally the definition is like
you you shall nurture personal relationships you shall do work that's meaningful but also want less
want less especially material things and fear less would you add something to the formula or perhaps
that's perfect for you i don't know uh well i i i think and it's also a quote i've made quite often
this past few days which i brought from toy story in war and peace everybody wants to change the
world very few want to change themselves and so ask a lot about what you can do and not nobody
will make the decision for you and it's very difficult i mean i'm paying a heavy price every
day my kids criticize me they say daddy you're asking for us to be sustainable and you keep
drinking water in plastic bottles and they're right it's being a change to be the change you
want to see in the world and everything comes from inside otherwise um is it true that's difficult
to find good italian pizza in washington dc okay okay okay okay thanks for the trip for the for the
tip um okay first question from the public batman and we've got three um it's from roxanna
cama firstly thank you for your amazing book my question is let me move the q a yeah my
question is what do you think is the role of the younger generation in leading purpose finance
what measures could be taken to influence slash educate students young graduates to take part
of this change and build sustainable economies so there are a lot of questions in in one question
so i think first of all the young people can do a lot on their own the way each each of us can
do a lot at the end of the day as i said if we don't change ourselves there is no way the world
is going to change so we have to be of course we have different capacity but i think people gather
today have more influence than the average people on earth so should it's not being flattering it's
just the truth so we should be very conscious uh of that but i remember a conversation i had
with paul pollman at that time he was the ceo of unilever and i told him why did you change the
course of unilever and he told me it's not just because it was my strong conviction it's also
because the uh i couldn't attract any talent and today if the young population say i don't
want to work in companies which produce crap which we which are doing bad things or et cetera
that will put pressure on the company so it's not just about investors if consumers say i don't want
to buy this type of thing so this type of service so we have we have the capital to to have this uh
pressure on people and they're young like anybody else so i think it's extremely important the
second point because i have kind of considered myself in retrospect what i've learned that school
has influenced me for many decades and so i think it's really time to to to work on the business
schools programs and university programs etc but what are you being taught at school will
have a lasting influence on what you do and it's very interesting because a month ago i was
asked by hccs or the french paris business school to give a keynote speech to all the first-year
students so they had just done uh they had a first quarter now compulsory introduction to
impact because they did a little research with companies so very nicely so and then you realize
that it's like a separate box and then the finance major hasn't changed at all and so you have a
problem to reconcile things so on the one end you have a track called purposeful leadership on the
other hand you have the track the finance major and and so for me it's very important to start
influencing all these things and that that will take time and for those of you who are in the
academic world which are teaching etc i think it's important to push these ideas uh that's what
i'm telling my students when i was in your shoes that's what i heard now you hear me try to to
see what you do uh but today uh uh to come back to your questions the jury is out so they have
conflicting things and uh so we have to help them make their i'm always reluctant because i don't
want to force people to do things i mean at the end of the day who am i to tell you this is
the right way for impact i mean there might be different ways but at least to to open their mind
and say there might be other ways to do things and it is true that we still emphasize
the old bifurcated system of returns and philanthropy thank you bertrand another question
for everybody with from a very good friend who is actually professor at catholic university tommaso
question about system we talk about sustainable investments but finance system is sustainable
banks and bank systems in many countries are very fragile but somehow leading the games
over the governments we need more cooperation but concretely who has the power to make some
concrete steps the german french partnership question tag it's a those are very good
questions one of the big difference between now and what happened in 1945 in bretton roads
basically the us imposed their way to the world even kent could not do anything he was
the smartest by fine buttonwoods but you know as apparently studying once asked about
the bat you can the vatican how many divisions and in 1945 all the gold was in fort knox and so
even if you were smart you had no choice so the us was a master of the world in the 1970s let me put
this was the anglo-saxon was a master of the world in particular the u.s and it's it's no wonder why
the consensus was called the washington consensus today it's more complex because you have no
master of the world so we'll see with biden he's apparently willing to wish off the u.s leadership
and re-engage but also as i said once it's america first with a smile we shouldn't be fooled by
this i mean it's it's very very much driven by a domestic agenda we have the chinese obviously
we can't ignore them and they were not existing in 1971 i mean even if it's the same years and
kissinger went to beijing with nixon and uh and so i believe that the europeans have a particular say
in this uh as you rightly reminded us probably uh the the europeans are ahead of the curve with
uh with the green recovery package and they stick to that i mean they're not being perfect
on every front as you very well know but on this i think they're still there they put together
this taxonomy package they put together this non-financial disclosure directive and so so
there is a lot that is happening in europe and i believe there is a way for europe to engage
the rest of the world and propose something so you can see it from two perspectives uh ideally
and interestingly i gave a lecture to a chinese university last week and it was pretty interesting
because that was the first time i had i think they told me i don't know whether it's truth i had
20 000 people listening to me which was very exciting that's a positive news the negative news
that it was at 11 p.m dc time so it was not so uh and i told them because i raised exactly the
same question and i say my my dream is that we are capable of coming together china europe
the us and the rest of the world to define what is sustainability what is resilience what
is inclusion uh so that's what i'm dreaming of but let's face it it's gonna be a long
way so there is a second best which is are we capable to have a western vision of that
i know western smells cold war but so for lack of a better world or let's call it g7 way that's
the second best and the third best which might be actually what we work at the end is a european
view because what i wouldn't like is the europeans to be once more naive so we've been ahead of the
curve we spent more time and more money around this but at the end of the day in particular the
americans smells good business and they are good at doing that i mean no wonder why the railing
agencies why the largest asset managers except for americans so will the system be defined by
the european the european commission taxonomy etc or will it be defined by blackrock bloomberg
and and the rating agencies i i don't know uh but you should all keep in mind that it's
not just uh the technical conversation it's it's discussion about our values actually what we are
discussing the norms that will emerge from this big uh planetary discussion will be defining what
is good and what is bad in 10 or 20 years from now and it's it's it's important questions
and if you are let's say a middle east somewhere in west phone and you say in 2045
i want to invest in in a good impact system which one do i choose do i choose a bloomberg
one or do i choose a taxonomy or do i choose the beijing one and that will have a lot of
impact and that's that's where i think don't be naive as european let's keep pushing
make sure our norms are taken in full account and uh and then try to engage with others
and try to come to do something together as you very well know it's not the case for for
for accounting standards we still are struggling with two the u.s gap and they're more than that
but ifrs and the two that ifrs are largely a u.s inspired and the eu has kind of abdicated this
so i don't want this to happen again we should not abdicate a second time we have to be strong
on this totally there are two more questions but am we the time has gone and i think you might have
other i don't know please tell me would you take another question or not or we stop here it's
been the first one we just won just one minute my office in washington today for
the first time uh since last june and uh and the team has organized a lunch
with with a person living for europe and so this is the first lunch
with the whole team in a year so i told them i'm going to be a little late but
i don't want to be too late i'm sorry for that very quickly from julia galluccio how do you
see the eu effort on taxonomy perhaps you answer already of sustainable activities that um that it
will help there's a small mistake that will help in finding the right path to transition is the
is it the right way to achieve the good results do you see a need for sustainable finance to
address the climate change adaptation needs in europe no i think i don't know whether it's a good
or the bad way the european way that's the only way we can do to have this big commission with
a multi-stakeholder 27 countries etc and at the end you have a sick book i i think it's kind of
okay but we have to make it marketable as soon as possible i mean we have to sell it to the rest
of the world and to explain what we mean with it as i said it's really time to engage because
what i'm hearing in washington is that biden is he gets that he has appointed somebody in his team
to follow climate finance somebody a treasury etc the all-american ecosystem the whole academic
system is behind it there is business and the people that will define what is impact will make
a lot of money so again we should not be naive and we have to push hard for what we've done because
at the end of the day we started a little earlier uh we are more genuine more sincere but sometimes
we are not as market friendly so that's uh yeah yeah yeah totally agree again well bertrand thank
you very very very much for this thought provoking talk thank you for um just just showing us the
bottle half full because the the more the world sinks into or the deeper the world seems into
chaos the the greater our responsibility to to radiate kindness empathy and generosity
and this is what you've done today with us by accepting our invitations so really thank you
very much and whenever you come to milan you will be welcomed by us another excuse with my daughter
in balcony so and us will be there welcoming you thank you very much thank you everyone rest of
the day and good luck for the end of the party the same for you in the us on the
other side of the atlantic bye-bye
