#13 Career Prospects in Sustainable Finance

Do you wonder how the next generation will survive global warming?

“Do you think now is the time for action but just don't know where to start?”

Do you think the contributions that you're making are just not enough? Why not make it your career and spend your life's work creating impact? I'm sorry and I'm obviously and both of us are so silly to be professionals. They're excited to be co-hosting the Green Guru Quartak of Quartak, all about mentorship for Green Pariards. Welcome everyone!

Today we have with us Mr. Sandeep Bhattacharya, who is the India Program Manager at the climate bonds initiative. Sandeep has more than 20 years of experience in the financial industry with its long stints with reputed firms across India and Malaysia. Sandeep now works to build a sustainable finance ecosystem in India, collaborating with financial institutions, consultancy firms, educational institutions, philanthropies and cooperates.

So he is placed in a unique position to give us a 360-degree view of the sustainable finance job market in India and give us a broad sense of where it is heading in the coming years. So welcome Sandeep so much, we've been really looking forward to this podcast and really glad to have you on board.

I spoke about climate bonds, so before I move on, I just want to first start with, can you

explain climate bonds in layman terms? Because otherwise you know, nobody will understand this introduction.

“I think this is, nobody understands this concept generally, you know?”

Correct. Understand, and you know, how does the big bad world of finance meet the so-called, you know, saving earth of, you know, the green of environment, you know? How do we save environment and also match the big bad world of finance? So let's take solar, it was nearly 60 years ago that the first solar panels came on, you

know, the voltage center. Today, they are rapidly spreading as, you know, the cheapest source of power globally and of course, in more than tropical countries which are closer to the equator. What has happened is that a lot of money has flown in, which has scaled this up, reduced marketing costs and made it cheaper.

I'm not saying it's only money, it's a lot of policy support, which makes Kickstarter the demand. But this wouldn't have happened without a lot of money coming in. And the bond markets are the single largest source of capital globally.

It's a hundred million dollars odd sometimes it goes up and down.

“So then if you can't tap the bond markets, then you have to wait, you know, 60, 70 years”

for each of these technologies to become scalable. We can't afford that green hydrogen become scalable in 70 years, that's just not on. So you need money at scale and that's what we try to do. We try to bring it money at scale and volume into new technologies, into new products, into new sectors, which the bond market as of now might not understand.

Right. Well, come Sunday, this is Rajeshri, very glad to have you on the podcast. I have a very simple question, actually, I work at climate policy initiative and on the surface, it may look like both these organizations do very similar work, but I would like to know if what you think about the difference between climate finance and sustainable finance.

It's used very interchangeably, would you like to talk about it a little bit? Yeah, of course. If the simplest thing I would say is look up the sustainable development goals for understanding what the sustainable finance is. So there is a certain overlap, it's not absolutely cut off, but sustainable finance would

also mean finance for say gender diversity, while I'm not saying that climate finance needs to be bereft of gender diversity, that's not the focus. So if we have to scale up say an industry, say an offshore wind, where till now women are not greatly employed, for various reasons, I don't know, I'm not trying to get into all that.

Yeah, it is, it is about scaling those sectors up, does a lot of sustainability matter

“for wind finance, yes it does, for if you look at agriculture, there are most of the small”

scale farmers are women and if you don't make agriculture sustainable say an Indian more than 80% of all farming is, you know, small scale farmers and a lot of women do the work. If the women are not educated and if we can't make the flow of finance easier to them, which to a great extent Bangladesh has done, then that's going to be very difficult. So if there are areas of overlap, there might be areas like offshore wind, where it might

not appear to be a part of the SDGs, but we'll still do it. So I would urge the oil listeners to look at the definitions just to pick with themselves with more details and more nuance that comes with these terminologies and once if you want

to get into the field, it's always good to know what is the exact difference and then define

your career part based on that. So thank you, thank you for making it a little clearer. So, some even still curious about when you say working with comment wants initiative, what does your work look like? What does a typical day look like for you?

“Well, the best thing is every day is very different. So, the best thing about working in”

CBS every day is very different. There is a final objective of bringing more and more players to the bond market. And on a day which has a lot of results showing, I will have maybe with two or three bond issuers who are finalizing their bond issuers, issuance means they are mobilizing, they have decided they will mobilize and they are mobilizing they are doing the mobilization. And we certify some of these transactions because we have

standards, so we will be working on certification. On another day, I might be with an educational institution planning session to educate a lot of their members. So, some of them are like say the CFA Institute which has a lot of access to fund managers who need to be told this or even work with government or regulator or consultancy firms all towards influencing more and more finance go with them. Certain cases, you know, we have to bid for certain projects

and it will create extended resembles consultancy organizations to a great exchange project like it is a very project base. But there is a lot of interaction with the financial market as well which generally is not the case with consulting firms. Consulting, you get one, then move on to the next and one might not have to do anything with the other. So, it is a huge variety. Right. Right. Great. Great. That sounds really interesting

“because I think you are working across regulators, students and along with your of course,”

a bond markets and financial institutions etc. So, it seems like a pretty exciting job that you have. I didn't know that, of course, I knew, but how much of awareness work do you do in this, you know, scenario? You said that you work with young students, do you see a need of a lot more awareness in this lean bonds? Climate bonds? Yes. Yes. There needs to be a lot more

awareness about what finance can really do. First, I think there needs to be some awareness

about climate change, not being a hoax, while that is receiving with, you know, news like this kind of heat wave on Canada and all that. It really sounds extremely strange and then you can relate it to people. But still there are people who feel that it's a leftist hoax and this and that have hurt that. So, now there's a little bit of needed awareness for that. So, one of our courses that we are designing is in collaboration with the Indian Institute of

Technology which brings a lot of credibility. So, if we partner with them, then, you know, a lot of people will feel that we are not, you know, perpetrators of some hoax. That is where is one thing. The other thing is then the question arises, how can conventional business actually do good? When, you know, capitalism is supposed to have brought us to this juncture, then how can the same capitalist market do any good? That's another question which

there are people who say that, you know, to do to overcome this, we need to go back to, you know,

the pre-industrial race when we didn't consume. Well, that's not going to happen. So, how do you match the current aspirations for consumption? Which, I mean, you might not say, you may or may not say it's legitimate, but you can't stop the work from having those aspirations and still manage to live sustainably. It's something which needs a lot of awareness. It reminds me of one of our earlier podcast, our guest, Marnika said, that finance is Maria Will,

and you can write poetry with finance. You may think that there are so many, there's so much innovation that's possible. And you can meet finance work for your benefit if you have the right

“mindset. So, I think such climate bonds initiative is very well placed to bridge the gap between”

both these worlds, which speak very different languages and seems like you're doing a perfect job for that. So, I want to switch gears and talk about the career aspects of this. You have had a long career in finance before you made a switch to sustainable finance industry. So, can you give our listeners a brief overview of what are the opportunities in this field? I'm asking this question

because we always see so many short-term trends in sustainability that keep coming and going and

where do you see opportunities for long-term career growth in this field? Yeah, so the point is, you know, we are consuming a lot more than we should and the earth can't keep it up and with it, with this fact comes, you know, the case that careers which direct this will stay for the

“long. Now, what careers are available? I'll keep myself confined to India. What careers are available”

in India is to the extent I have seen. The highest number of careers are available in the offshoring of ESG research. The if you take off talk of sheer numbers, I don't have the numbers of my fingers, but I can I can see very clearly that there's a lot of people into that. So, the thing is it's it's about over-expping cheaper here than say in Europe or US and we have well-trained staff who can analyze and crunch and balance it to see, you know, how ESG

friendly this particular company is and against some certain benchmarks which are which have already been set. These are these are not perfect benchmarks and they are numerous benchmarks, but this is the most high number of careers and I see this growing for quite some time because this, you know, this cause differential between overheads here and overheads in the US and Europe

will remain for quite some time now. That is one. The second is the space where, you know,

like you have the NGOs which are largely dependent on grants from offshore philanthropies Indian philanthropies still haven't caught up on this. So, it's like climate policy initially for climate bonds initially for CBP or the climate group. Where you generally have, you know, a lot of interaction and player kind of a bridging role bridging, educated, dissemination kind of a role. There's there's a lot of variety which is good here, but

there are issues of sometimes your donors not being very well connected with what you're doing. Well, these are there and increasingly, like city bank in the US has hived off its sustainable investment banking that has happened with EMUFG in Singapore. This is going to happen. I now have a few meetings with some investment banks who are, you know, thinking of this. So, you can have a very traditional investment banking career, but in sectors which are only green.

So, these are some of the stuff which I have seen of course, the big four have allied businesses on this and verification, which is a typical big four or any other consulting, not is not only big four. A typical consulting career. So, in some of the careers which I can see, each having its own

“characteristics and preferences. So, that's what one needs to identify when you're trying to identify”

or target a career. What is for you, you know, needs to be based on that. Yeah, following up on that only, what do you think of some of the skillsets that are required for

very different kinds of roles. So, what do you think that's some of the skills that are required?

Yeah. So, for an ESG research which is generally offshode, what you need to have is excellent online research skills. So, you should be able to get very fast to a source of information

“which you will compile in report. That's very important. You need to be able to scan through”

documents to get to your data very fast because it's very productivity-like. If you take too much of time, then you know the cost arbitrage disappears. So, it's very, it's relatively standardized work. If you do it very fast and you know, there are things like understanding SLAs, service level

agreements, you have to adhere to, you need to understand what this SLAs, service level agreements are.

And you need to have a little bit of sensitivity to difference in culture. The person in US is expecting something and you might be understanding something else. So, these are there. These are inbound, which means you don't go out for meetings. So, if you are not okay with that, well, then you need to avoid it. If you are somebody who doesn't like to travel forward, you don't want to be out in the traffic jam and in the portals, then this is perfect for you. But then there's where

“you have to make a choice. In the NGO kind of a role, again, we have a lot of variety. Generally,”

you have a lot of variety of work and it's relatively project-based. So, then you have to jump from one job to the other and you might feel your efficiency is a bit low because you're doing so many things, doing a job repeatedly makes you more efficient. So, if you'd like to be efficient, then you know, ESG results might be a good thing. If you like variety, then these NGO kind of profiles might be slightly better. Within consulting, it could be both. But as you go slightly senior,

your variety will increase within consulting. Again, consulting is as a lot of variety. One day,

you're working in both one or the next day, you can work in New Zealand at the third day. You can

work in Sri Lanka and on this range of topics. So, this is the thing. In the consulting or even sometimes the NGO roles, sometimes you might feel that you're delivering a document because somebody is asking for certain things. And that person, you might feel might not be in touch with reality.

“So, sometimes you have to deliver a document which you know will hit the shelf. Maybe some”

devils read it 100 years ends. So, that is a part of, well, that's part of the game. I mean, but it's not that you have a tremendous amount of impact. The impact is tremendous, but within to keep the impact going, you have to keep the cash flow also going and sometimes the cash look comes with these kind of reports which, well, no, be my treat. So, you have to be, you have to have some degree of comfort with that. So, even you have, you know, what, what you work

for, like, you use a kind of screen corporates or startups for being, you know, scare for being scale up. So, that is also, has a lot of variety use. He's so many startups all over the place. Then comes the next step comes is the startups with very innovative ideas about solving issues. They need to get some support. You know, the people in the team might not know everything. They'll need technical support. They'll need financial infusion. And to do that, you have incubators.

So, and then, therefore, you have the startups. So, the startup is just like any other startup. You have to do a lot with very limited resources, which is exactly the opposite of CADS research. You generally would have all the resources. You need to be very efficient with it. So, this is exactly the opposite. So, then what happens is these startups need initial funding and that comes from generally a venture capital. After a minimum amount of scale up, a minimum amount of operations,

you get it from a venture capital. Now, venture capital, what is the scale do you need? In a venture capital, maybe six or seven out of the ten you invest will go down the drain. The three or four need to give you the exponential return which will compensate for this. So, you have to have an eye for that. It's not just analysis and industry. It's also an eye for scalability and extreme profitability of some of these businesses. When these businesses have gone up to a certain

the private equity firm often invests in large companies which are not reaching its potential

“or investing in many of these kinds of companies who have reached a certain scale. So, they will”

come in invest equity generally and exist in maybe five or six years or sometimes longer. So, this is the ecosystem of equity. Now, that follows on to listed companies. So, now, there are quite a few ESG funds who are supposed to go on to ESG companies and most of them currently in India are going only to well governed companies because they're not too many environmental friendly companies, they're in the listed stock market. But as you saw TCS and HGFC

bank are aiming towards net zero. So, number of stocks will grow and therefore, this is a

very growing field. So, if you want to be a fund manager with a very growing portfolio, it's nearly non-existent and these mutual funds, they have some funds but most of them are not into environmental investing now. But then they can be great. In between comes what is known as

“impact investing. If you want to understand that well, I think you should read”

Mohammad Yunus, you know the Nobel Prize winner who started Grameen, it's about start, it's his book on social business, you know what, that is what ideally it should be. But here you have a very much for profit companies with a very distinct impact. So, this is a separate nation often many philanthropies support this. So, while you are doing a DD deal making it is like an investment bank or a fund, but you often have support from philanthropies for certain impacts and some of the

component of your money might not require the commercial return. We have to be able to toggle between these kind of things. So, these are upsides and downsides, the upsides and downsides everywhere, it's just your choice about what you take, what is your choice. And I am out of all of this, I mean I have to ask you if you've laid it out very nicely, summarized the whole ecosystem. Where do you see, I mean, I know you've already answered this question in terms of, but since you,

you know, just put out this map of where all everything is going and where should you fit according to your personality and your career choice? What do you think is the most exciting space right now to be in terms of India and the way it's growing and moving towards more of sustainability,

I would say, finally. A lot of work currently is in the policy space and that will be so

for the next at least one or half to three years. It's simply because the policies are getting laid and are being rolled out. So, if you are into, there will be a lot of work for advisory on government policies. There's a lot of work there. When that is, that has reached a certain level, then you will have a lot of these, many other industries besides utility scale, renewable energy, scale up. Then you will have finance with a lot of variety and then you will have a lot of these

“investment banks will scale up. So, in terms of a lot of work now, a lot, I think is there in”

policy advisory and some of it might not have a finance element, it might be very technical. But it has, that's, make a difference to the ecosystem of this. Where it's heading towards the policy. For sure, create, I mean this was extremely informative. So, deep, I'm sure, if anybody who wants to pursue a career in this space would be extremely interested to hear about this and also, some deep has agreed to mentor, at least to people who are interested in this career. So,

please do apply for mentorship. We'll be happy to connect you to some deep. I think if you are looking for being in the finance space in India generally in the sustainable space, there is no one more experience than some deep. So, take this opportunity and he's the best person who can guide you. So, again, thank you, thanks a lot, Deep for taking time out. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much, and Deep, and thank you for being so candid and putting it in such

simple words for listeners who are probably just starting out their careers and a lot of it is very easy for them sitting outside of the industry. So, I'm sure this is going to benefit them a lot, and if you've already answered a lot of questions that we get on a regular basis. So,

Thank you, Deep. Thank you. Thank you.