In this second compilation focused on emerging markets, we revisit conversations featuring three investors who are channeling substantial capital into regions where others hesitate to go – and they’re doing it with discipline, innovation, and deep local insight.

Each of these guests brings a different strategy and perspective, but all are working toward the same goal: building sustainable, scalable businesses that meet the needs of underserved communities.

And they’re doing it in ways that challenge the old assumptions: that impact comes at the expense of return, that emerging markets are too volatile to be investable, or that scalable solutions must come from the West.

Here are the featured voices:

Sandeep Farias, Founder and Managing Partner of Elevar Equity

Elevar backs what they call entrepreneurial households – more than 50 million families across emerging markets who’ve moved beyond the bottom of the pyramid. While they’re making economic progress, they still lack access to the products and services that support their ambitions and daily lives.

Sandeep and his team take a bottom-up, equity-focused approach to identify the “core solutions” these families prioritize – like education, healthcare, and agriculture – and invest in entrepreneurs building businesses to serve them.

With five funds deployed across India and Latin America, Elevar stays close to both customers and founders, spending time in the field to understand how people live, what they value, and where capital can make the greatest difference.

Full episode

Rochus Mommartz, the CEO of responsAbility

Rochus leads responsAbility – one of the world’s largest dedicated impact asset managers, with $5 billion under management and more than $15 billion deployed across emerging markets since inception.

His team doesn’t start with products. They start with problems – like the 500 million people in Africa who still lack electricity, or the small businesses across Asia and Latin America that can’t get financing. Then they find the companies solving those problems and shape capital to support their growth.

Rochus draws a clear line between real and perceived risk. Emerging markets aren't short on opportunity – they're just often misunderstood by investors who rely too much on spreadsheets and not enough on what’s actually happening on the ground.

Check out the full interview:

Part 1

Part 2

Sugandhi Matta, Chief Impact Officer at ABC Impact

Sugandhi helped launch ABC Impact with backing from Temasek and Temasek Trust – and helped shape it into the largest Pan-Asian private equity fund dedicated to impact.

From the start, her focus has been on building a strategy rooted in Asia’s realities – not imported from somewhere else. That meant starting with evidence: mapping the region’s most urgent needs, identifying where scalable solutions could take hold, and designing an impact framework from the ground up.

ABC now manages close to $1 billion across sectors like healthcare, financial inclusion, sustainable food, and climate resilience. They back mission-driven founders solving problems they’ve lived – and who have the resilience and discipline to scale.

Full episode

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The mainstream investment community has long viewed emerging and frontier markets as high-risk regions fraught with numerous challenges. However, with growing populations and expanding digital access, these regions are poised to become the economic powerhouses of the future.

In this compilation episode, we revisit 3 past conversations from Eliza Foo, Asha Mehta, and Monica Brand Engel, who are leveraging the power of impact investing to drive meaningful change across emerging economies.

Each of these guests shared how they are turning risks into opportunities in emerging markets while earning impressive returns for their investors.

By 2050, these regions will account for 70% of the global population and 50% of global GDP. This statistic alone shows the big opportunities that exist for businesses and investors alike.

But we can’t wish away the risks. Countries within these regions are often marked by political and economic volatility. In these conversations, we talk about evaluating these risks and overcoming challenges through innovative impact investing strategies.

Eliza Foo, Director, Impact Investing at Temasek

Eliza Foo is a leader at Temasek, one of the world’s most prestigious global investment firms, with a portfolio valued at USD $288 billion. Temasek invests across both public and private markets, operating with the flexibility of its own balance sheet, allowing them to pursue diverse opportunities across sectors, geographies, and asset classes.

As the head of Temasek’s Impact Investing team, Eliza plays a big role in the firm’s mission to create value for both current and future generations. Under her leadership, Temasek has championed innovative investments in emerging markets, focusing on critical areas such as financial inclusion, healthcare, agriculture, and climate change.

Full episode

Asha Mehta, Managing Partner & CIO at Global Delta Capital

Asha Mehta is a visionary leader at the intersection of impact and investment, with a deep commitment to unlocking the untapped potential in emerging and frontier markets. As the managing partner and CIO of Global Delta Capital, a US-based equity long-only investment manager, Asha and her team harness the power of capital to fuel social and economic development across international, emerging, and frontier markets.

Her work combines systematic investing in publicly listed equities with a strong focus on generating both alpha and measurable impact.

Full episode

Monica Brand Engel, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Quona Capital

Monica is an impact pioneer with a specialized focus on financial inclusion in emerging and frontier markets. Through Quona Capital, she leads investments in micro, small, and medium-sized businesses to drive economic growth and provide solutions to underserved and underbanked communities.

Quona focuses on innovative fintech solutions that bridge the financial infrastructure gap in these regions. By investing in digital payments, tailored lending platforms, accessible insurance, and neo-banking services, Quona enables millions of people to access financial tools previously unavailable to them. Her investments in emerging markets center on creating sustainable financial products that cater to the unique needs of local populations.

Full episode

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My guest today is Vojkan Brankovic, founder of Apeiron, a principal investment firm that is shaping the future of sustainable real estate investment. Founded in 2013, Apeiron has established itself as a leader in high-impact real asset opportunities, specializing in logistics real estate across Europe.

With over 30 years of investment management experience, Vojkan has positioned Apeiron at the forefront of logistics real estate investment, currently managing a portfolio of 500,000 square meters across strategic German locations spanning the full value chain from opportunistic and value-add to core+ strategies.

Vojkan's journey into real estate began far from the world of buildings and investments, with his early years spent between Sweden and Belgrade, Serbia, followed by time in the UK. This upbringing shaped much of his entrepreneurial mindset and leadership style.

Growing up in these diverse cultures gave him an early understanding of adaptability and collaboration, 2 key factors that would later influence how he built Apeiron. It was this exposure to different ways of thinking, working, and leading that laid the foundation for his approach to business.

While his background had always been in business and finance, he found his true passion in real estate. He saw it not just as a way to generate financial returns, but as an opportunity to make a positive environmental impact.

This vision was rooted in the recognition that the real estate sector, particularly logistics, was one of the largest contributors to global carbon emissions. But it was also where he saw the greatest potential for change.

What sets Vojkan apart is how he’s using real estate as a way to do good while making money. For him, it's about transforming inefficient buildings into assets that serve a greater purpose.

His vision for sustainable, technology-enabled logistics infrastructure has attracted partnerships with leading institutional investors from Korea and the Middle East, demonstrating the global appeal of Apeiron's differentiated investment approach.

One of the interesting features of Apeiron is its lean approach to business. While many firms in the real estate investment space operate with large teams and complex structures, Apeiron keeps things simple and efficient. With just 5 people in its team, the firm can make quick strategy decisions and stay nimble in an industry that’s often slow to change.

Through Apeiron, Vojkan is demonstrating that real estate doesn’t just have to be about buildings and profits—it can be about purpose, too.

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Additional Resources:

🔹 Apeiron Capital Limited Website: https://www.apeiron.com/

🔹 Vojkan Brankovic LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brankovic/

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Books mentioned:

🔹 “The Culture Map,” Erin Meyer: https://amzn.to/4lDLhI6

🔹 “The Edge: How competition for resources is pushing the world, and its climate, to the brink – and what we can do about it,” Jonathan Maxwell: https://amzn.to/3TrJ86r

In May, I spoke with four leaders who are reshaping what finance can do – and who it can serve.

In this compilation episode, I’ve pulled together the most powerful ideas, turning points, and takeaways from those conversations. If something resonates, you can dive deeper – the links to each full episode are below.

Here's the list of featured guests:

Nasir Qadree, Founder and Managing Partner of Zeal Capital Partners

Nasir launched Zeal in early 2020 – right as the pandemic began. For many, it seemed like the worst possible timing. For him, it was exactly the right moment.

He saw a market that wasn’t working for most entrepreneurs – and a venture ecosystem that kept recycling capital into the same places, the same profiles, and the same narrow definitions of potential.

Zeal’s model is built around what Nasir calls “inclusive investing” – a five-part framework designed to widen the lens on where and how capital gets deployed.

Full episode

Hadewych Kuiper, Managing Director at Triodos Investment Management

Hadewych joined Triodos right as the 2008 financial crisis hit. While other banks were collapsing under the weight of financial engineering, Triodos kept growing – because they weren’t in the business of making money with money. Their investments were grounded in the real economy, and that made all the difference.

Today, Hadewych leads the firm’s €6 billion portfolio across what they call five transition themes: food, resources, energy, society, and well-being.

Her mission is bigger than impact investing. It’s about transforming the financial sector itself.

Full episode

Romina Reversi, Managing Director and Head of Sustainable Investment Banking Americas at Crédit Agricole CIB

Romina started her career in equity derivatives at J.P. Morgan – a role she calls foundational for everything that came next. But in 2015, she pivoted into a niche team focused on green bonds. She was one of the earliest hires in J.P. Morgan’s ESG debt capital markets group, helping to shape the playbook as they went.

Now at Crédit Agricole, she leads sustainable investment banking for the Americas – overseeing ESG advisory, green and sustainability-linked financing, and supply chain solutions.

Her team helped launch the first U.S. corporate green bond tied to nuclear energy, and structured the world’s first sovereign bond with a step-up/step-down coupon tied to emissions and biodiversity targets.

Full episode

Michele Giddens, Co-Founder and CEO of Bridges Fund Management

Michele was asked to advise the UK Treasury’s Social Investment Task Force, chaired by Sir Ronald Cohen. That experience led directly to the founding of Bridges, with a white sheet of paper and £10 million in catalytic government funding. The idea: to show that financial returns and social impact didn’t have to be at odds.

Today, Bridges has over £2 billion in assets under management across private equity, real estate, and outcomes contracts. Every investment aligns with one of two goals: building a more inclusive economy or a more sustainable planet. Their theory of change is simple – use financial capital to tackle systemic challenges, and value creation will follow.

Full episode

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Today’s guest is Mark Hays, Director of Sustainable & Impact Investing at Glenmede — a firm managing $48 billion with a client-to-employee ratio that keeps conversations personal and strategy focused.

Mark’s journey into finance started early — running a lemonade stand to save up for a Sega Genesis and learning about markets through a third-grade stock project that didn’t go as planned. That early curiosity eventually led to a career spanning Cambridge Associates, OMERS, Flat World, and J.P. Morgan — where he became the firm’s first U.S. sustainable investing hire.

Now at Glenmede, Mark helps clients align their portfolios with their principles — not just in theory, but through tangible investments.

Glenmede offers investment management, wealth planning, fiduciary, and advisory services to high-net-worth individuals, families, endowments, foundations, and institutional clients.

It has $48 billion in assets under management, but keeps a 4-to-1 client-to-employee ratio and promises, in Mark’s words, “the experience of a $200 million family as a $10 million individual.” That approach means every client gets tailored advice, deeper conversations, and impact reporting that goes far beyond ESG scores.

Nearly 20 percent of AUM sits in strategies that fit Glenmede’s four-category investment taxonomy (Integrated, Mandated, Thematic, High-Impact Concessionary) and span almost every asset class.

Mark’s through-line is what he calls “sustainable prosperity” — the belief that helping those with the least doesn’t take away from others, but actually creates more opportunity and value for everyone.

At Glenmede, that vision shows up not only in where the money goes but in how clients are engaged. Mark and his team don’t just plug people into products — they guide multi-generational families through deep, often difficult conversations about values, legacy, and measurable impact.

That means starting with inquiry, moving through education, assessment, and implementation, and ending with real measurement — not in vague ESG scores, but in tangible results like gallons of water saved, emissions avoided, or communities reached.

Mark knows that impact is a moving target, but he also knows how to hit it: by staying curious, staying human, and staying honest about what money can and cannot do.

Tune in to hear how he turns that approach into measurable impact.

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Additional Resources:
🔹 Mark Hays LinkedIn
🔹 E-mail: mark.hays@glenmede.com
🔹 Glenmede Website

🔹 2025 Market Outlook
🔹 As You Sow Website
🔹 See if your investments are sustainable with this free tool.

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SRI360 interviews mentioned:

🔹Andrew Behar: Ep 27

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Books mentioned:
🔹 “Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now,” John Doerr
🔹 “The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale,” Simon Clark

My guest today is Sugandhi Matta, Chief Impact Officer at ABC Impact – the largest Pan-Asian impact-dedicated private equity fund, with nearly $900 million in AUM.

Sugandhi began her career focused on growth and returns — first at Temasek, and later at Actis. But after a breast cancer diagnosis in her early thirties, she returned to work with a new question: What if she could apply her investing skills to businesses solving real problems?

That question led her to LeapFrog Investments — and eventually to ABC Impact, where she became one of the founding partners. From the ground up, she helped build a fund that integrates impact into every step of the investment process, from deal screening to reporting.

Today, ABC Impact invests across four themes:

• Climate and water solutions
• Financial and digital inclusion
• Better health and education
• Sustainable food and agriculture

Sugandhi leads the firm’s impact team. They developed a proprietary system rooted in the five dimensions of the Impact Management Project and tailored to ABC’s sectors.

The internal language centers on three Cs: consistency, comparability, and communicability. It’s a disciplined approach – built to align intention, data, and outcomes across the portfolio.

Sugandhi's goal is to hold impact to the same standard as IRR.

However, she points out that the burden of proof is often uneven. Expected returns are taken at face value. Impact is asked to justify itself at every turn. Because investors don’t yet trust its metrics the way they trust financial ones.

The double standard isn’t just about data. It’s about gender, too.

As one of the few female investment leads in Asia’s private equity ecosystem, Sugandhi has had to thread her way through what she calls the “quiet skepticism” – the unspoken assumptions around risk appetite, ambition, or expertise.

Even now, she’s often the only woman in the room with GPs or LPs. She doesn’t lead with gender, but she’s aware of how it plays out. The skepticism is often unspoken, but present.

Over time, she’s learned not to internalize it. Instead, she focuses on the work, knowing that – fairly or not – being a woman in this space can mean having to prove yourself just a little more.

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Additional Resources:

ABC Impact website

ABC Impact LinkedIn

Sugandhi Matta LinkedIn

ABC’s 2020 Impact Report

ABC’s 2024 Impact Report

Insights from Dalberg and ABC Impact’s User-Centered Study

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SRI360 interviews mentioned:

💎 Stewart Langdon: Ep 17

💎 Eliza Foo: Ep 71

💎 Sharon Vosmek: Ep 07

💎 Tara Bishop: Ep 70

💎 4 Women-Led Funds: 4-in-1 Ep 86

💎 Sir Ronald Cohen: Ep 73

My guest today is Michelle Arevalo-Carpenter, Co-Founder of IMPAQTO and General Partner at IMPAQTO Capital. Michelle is a human rights lawyer by training, a fund builder by calling, and one of the most compelling system-reimaginers I’ve ever had on the show.

Michelle’s journey has taken her from a small apartment in Quito to the halls of Oxford and the UN — and back again. What she learned along the way is that real change doesn’t come from reports or elite institutions. It comes from being close to the problem — and the people.

Back in Quito, Michelle started where many great entrepreneurial stories begin — with no office, no plan, just an instinct that something better could exist. Over a hundred coffees with local founders, she kept hearing the same themes: isolation, lack of support, funding that didn’t fit.

In response, she created IMPAQTO, Ecuador’s first coworking space for social ventures, not because she had a real estate vision, but because people needed a place to belong. “They weren’t paying for square meters,” she said. “They were paying to not be alone.”

From there, IMPAQTO grew — into an accelerator, a research platform, a voice in policy. But the biggest problem persisted: no capital. Or rather, the wrong kind of capital.

Local businesses needed $10K–$500K. They didn’t want to sell equity. They wanted to grow on their own terms. Too big for microfinance, too small for venture. “That’s the missing middle,” Michelle said. “That’s where we live.”

So in 2021, she launched IMPAQTO Capital, a revenue-based investment fund designed not to chase unicorns but to nourish sustainable growth. Michelle described it not as alternative capital, but as capital that’s appropriate for the context they’re operating in.

Rather than chasing foreign LPs, her team went local. They raised over half their first close from Ecuadorian and Andean-region families — people with lived experience inside the very systems the fund aims to change. “Our investors aren’t impact tourists,” she said. “They’re system insiders.”

What Michelle is building isn’t just a capital vehicle. It’s an ecosystem intervention — a cultural shift that treats belonging as a precondition for growth, and care as critical infrastructure. She’s also a co-founder of CLIIQ, a regional research and advocacy platform focused on unlocking catalytic capital for women-led businesses.

At IMPAQTO Capital, every deal is evaluated not just on returns, but on whether it preserves the dignity and agency of the founder. Every exit includes a “cap party” — a ritual of closure and celebration that says: You did it. You paid us back. We’re done. And we’re proud.

There’s a lot to learn from Michelle. About capital. About leading with trust and care. About staying rooted in a place and still seeing the whole system.

But mostly, about how change happens — not from the top down, but from the inside out. Slowly. With proximity. And with people who never forgot where they started.

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About the SRI 360° Podcast: The SRI 360° Podcast is focused exclusively on sustainable & responsible investing.

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Additional Resources:

IMPAQTO Capital website

IMPAQTO Ecosystem Builder

Michelle Arevalo-Carpenter website

Michelle Arevalo-Carpenter LinkedIn

This spring, I had the chance to talk with four incredible guests, each with a different take on what it really means to put money to work and invest in line with your values.

Across late March and April, we explored climate-smart timber, social finance powered by dormant bank accounts, fully impact-focused wealth advising, and how catalytic capital is reaching places most firms won’t go.

Here are the featured guests, along with links to their full interviews.

Yasemin Saltuk Lamy, Head of Investment Strategy at Legal & General (L&G)

Yasemin’s path into impact investing started at J.P. Morgan, where she helped build the firm’s Social Finance unit from scratch. At the time, even defining the term “impact investing” took months of debate. “We spent four months just on the word ‘intent,’” she told me.

That focus on intent stuck with her – from J.P. Morgan to Omidyar to BII – where she helped lead the Catalyst Portfolio, growing it from $300 million to $1.6 billion. Her work was all about finding places where capital didn’t naturally flow, and designing structures that would pull others in.

Full episode

Stephanie Cohn Rupp, Former CEO of Veris Wealth Partners

Veris Wealth Partners is one of the only wealth management firms out there that’s 100% impact. No ESG sideline, no separate division. The whole firm is built around aligning portfolios with values.

Another thing that stood out in my conversation with Stephanie was how methodical their process is. It starts with what they call “impact discovery” – getting into the client’s mission, history, beliefs – and then building an investment policy around that.

Full episode

Stephen Muers, Chief Executive Officer of Better Society Capital (BSC)

Stephen brings a systems lens to social finance, and that comes from experience. After years inside the UK government tackling big issues like energy policy, housing, and justice reform, he saw firsthand how strategy alone doesn’t shift systems.

At BSC, the mission isn’t just to make good investments. It’s to make social investment possible at scale.

But BSC isn’t trying to maximize its own portfolio. The goal is to grow the entire social investment market. Over the past decade, they’ve helped expand it twelve-fold across the UK. And yet, it still isn’t enough. The capital’s growing – but not at the pace the problems demand.

Full episode

Bettina von Hagen, Managing Director & CEO, EFM Investments & Advisory

At EFM, forests are managed as long-term, living assets. It’s not just about timber – it’s about carbon, conservation, and communities, all managed through a single strategy. The question isn’t “how much can we harvest,” but “what’s the best outcome for this acre?”

EFM’s approach is built on the five Rs: rotation, retention, reserves, restoration, and relationships. It’s how they manage over 200,000 acres with just 11 staff and 90 contractors – by treating each forest like a custom portfolio.

Sometimes that means harvesting. Sometimes it means carbon storage or tribal access. The goal is a forest that’s more valuable ecologically, socially, and financially than it was before.

Full episode

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