Sustainable finance and SFO

The Sustainable Finance Observatory awarded prizes to the winners of its first challenge

27 March 2023

The CaixaBank AM - FundsPeople Sustainable Finance Observatory organised a meeting on sustainable finance and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with the participation of Isabel Vento, Head of Business Development in BlackRock Iberia, and Julia Salazar, Director of Sales at Amundi in Spain. In addition, the prizes for the 1st Sustainable Finance Observatory Challenge were awarded at the event.

Esther Vaquero, lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration (Comillas ICADE), was in charge of introducing the speakers and conducting the event. During her speech, Isabel Vento, Head of Business Development for BlackRock Iberia, presented her vision on how to align the SDGs with business strategies and sustainable investment objectives.

For her part, Julia Salazar, Amundi's Sales Director, analysed sustainable investment models with fixed income, especially green bonds. "The financial markets are going to play a key role in sustainable development and fixed income is one of the most efficient means for this purpose, as it invests in specific projects", she said.

After the speakers' speeches, the prizes for the 1st Challenge posed by the Sustainable Finance Observatory were awarded to the students at Comillas. In this first edition, the jury, made up of María Folqué (Fundspeople), Pablo Hernández de la Merced (CaixaBank Asset Management), and Elisa Aracil, as director of the Observatory, awarded the first prize, ex aequo, to the "Green Future" and "Greenfield Partners" teams. The runner-up prize went to the "ASR" team, congratulated for their work.

The challenge, which was launched last February during the "What is sustainable finance" meeting, was to solve a real industry problem by providing innovative solutions.