Words of Wisdom The hardest thing about bringing these reports together is to get to the end and realise there were so many wonderful, interesting and insightful comments that didn’t find a place in the body of the report. For that reason, last year we created this ‘Words of Wisdom’ section to deliver some of those ‘missing’ insights. Think of it as the ‘cutting room floor’. We hope you enjoy them. “There are interesting philosophical questions about whether you try and work from the bottom up (in other words, just try and kill off all the problematic stuff in your portfolio); whether you try and actively shift your portfolio into things that are definitively 'green', or whether you take your existing portfolio and make it as 'green' as it can be or whether, in fact, you do some combination of those three things. Now, those are philosophical questions! With securitisation it's probably not too tricky because, provided what you're doing isn't a problem, it's probably okay and you should actively seek to try and get as much as you can of the stuff which is pushing for good outcomes.” - Local Investor
“Impact is a very valid and important part of the whole ecosystem, but I think there's as much to be done with the greys of the world, as there are with the ultra-greens.” - Local Investor
“Energy companies using more 'green' energy sources can have huge impacts. But equally, you can have 'green' bonds which are lacking in substance, shall we say. I think the fact that people are being more nuanced in the way that we think about things just massively increases the opportunity set of things that you can look at. “ - Local Investor
“In terms of the mortgage market the ‘S’ and the ‘G’s are just, you know, waking up every day putting your pants on. That's what you do.” - Local Investor
“Green bond reporting will become more and more of a science, and so you'll find there'll be more and more exposure in that area to environmental finance.” - Non Bank Issuer
“The other thing that also is extremely relevant - again, this comes back to the skews we see – is, on the investor side, there are even less women. I have done a lot of road shows and it is very rare for me to meet women that are representing fund managers, fixed income investors, anyone on that investor side, and often I'll do 20 investor meetings and there'll be one female across all the meetings. So I do think that the gender diversity, maybe in terms of industry as a whole - it may look like there are a lot of women but they're very much skewed to particular products and pockets (say trustees, legal). There are pockets that are very, very under-represented in that space.” - Non Bank Issuer
“I think my biggest one, to be honest, is the macro trend. You know, think about the macro trend as one of electrification and one of distribution. When you go to distributed assets, you are talking about translating people's OpEx, like paying energy bills, into CapEx, i.e. buying solar and that, if we just take the solar market for example, is accelerating. If you could go back 10-or-so years, Australia was putting 120,000 of those things on the roofs and now we’re in the 300,000s, and the rate is sort of increasing. So there is what I would call an OpEx to CapEx trend.” - Non Bank Issuer
32 Sustainability in Securitisation
