Goldman Sachs is seeing increasing opportunities to deliver leading sustainability and impact investing expertise to its clients across a broad range of growth themes. As a first step in that effort, the firm has announced the formation of the Sustainable Finance Group. This group will be responsible for partnering with its own businesses to better serve clients, drive innovation and capture emerging opportunities as sustainable growth becomes more top of mind for investors, institutions and companies around the world.
The Sustainable Finance Group acts as a commitment to deploying the firm’s expertise and position in the capital markets to help address issues that impact society has long been a core element of its culture. They believe that two long-term priorities are more inclusive economic growth and addressing climate change. Increasingly, these persistent and accelerating drivers represent a strategic growth opportunity and competitive necessity for the firm and their clients.
The group will be led by John Goldstein, who co-founded Imprint Capital, a dedicated sustainable investing firm acquired by Goldman Sachs Asset Management in 2015. Within the group, Kyung-Ah Park will continue to lead our environmental markets work and also drive innovative finance. Kara Succoso Mangone will serve as chief operating officer of the effort, leveraging her experience engaging with our global investor base on these issues.
The group’s efforts in delivering sustainable growth solutions for clients will be guided and supported by a cross-divisional steering group comprising senior business leaders who are already engaged with our clients on these opportunities. This group will ensure effective coordination and drive a number of initiatives to provide clients the most comprehensive sustainability expertise across financing, advisory, risk management, asset management and investing.
The group will focus on identifying and executing on important sustainable growth opportunities will also further reinforce our existing efforts through Launch With GS, the Urban Investment Group, 10,000 Women and 10,000 Small Businesses, as well as their own internal operational sustainability initiatives.
In the months ahead, the firm pledge to develop specific goals and objectives for their work in this area, and they look forward to their employee’s collective input and contributions while advancing this strategic priority.
