Looking forward
Australian market participants see reasons for optimism about the evolution of local sustainable capital markets. They are looking for a range of developments in 2019.
CHEN I think some of the things we have touched on will be more developed in 12 months’ time. We have talked about loans, and I think we will have seen the first environmental, social and governance-linked loan in the Australian and New Zealand market by the end of 2019. I don’t think the conversation around taxonomies will go away. There are a lot of different views around the table today and I think the conversation will continue.
KENNA A year is not a lot of time in our work. We may be sitting here being hard on ourselves again. Hopefully we will have moved forward and made progress on some of the trickier issues we have spoken about. It can be easy to feel like nothing is being achieved because day-by-day and week-by-week it is hard to measure. But looking back over a year or two we can see that we have come quite a long way.
BISCHOFF Purely from an issuance side, we are hoping to see the continuing engagement and development of dialogue. Hopefully this means we can step into more markets, even if they are ones others have already been to but are novel for us.
I like the idea that we can have a circular relationship with a party. In other words, we arrange a bond for a company which uses the proceeds, and then we can offer it deposit facilities which have a green lens to them. This relationship can have lots of touch points where there is a green overlay. It feels like this will become more relevant.
ZILELI I think we will see the continued development of standardised impact reporting and more use of the UN Sustainable Development Goals to represent that impact. We have started to see this already, but I think it will accelerate.
It can be easy to feel like nothing is being achieved because day-by-day and week-by-week it is hard to measure. But looking back over a year or two we can see that we have come quite a long way.
BLACKSTOCK Product and asset development are the keys for me. Hopefully we will be talking about a broader suite of things than we have done so far.
TAPLEY I think we’ll be talking about the policy environment. If there is a change in government a different conversation will be occurring on climate-change initiatives and sustainability more generally.
FOX I think we will be talking about the role of digitisation in this space as well. This is something which hasn’t come up but will be an exciting development.
WHITE One interesting area is in superannuation, where there is a move back to internal mandates. We could see this change in superannuation funds’ approach and this in turn could drive more action on the corporate side.
WHITE Definitely – and the superannuation funds are also very domestic focused.
