Ekaterina Grigoryeva

Ekaterina has nearly 20 years of experience helping financial institutions globally to integrate environmental and social dimensions into their operations, both from ESG risk and sustainable finance opportunities standpoints. Throughout her two-decades long career in sustainable finance and ESG, she held various roles at the World Bank and International Finance Corporation covering ESG strategy, policy, standards and frameworks, investment due diligence, research and innovation. She played a vital role in designing World Bank’s own corporate environmental and social standards, policies and procedures.

In her last role, she delivered global leadership in sustainable finance by integrating ESG risk management structures into World Bank’s financial sector lending portfolio and building capacity of financial institutions across 5 global regions and over 40 countries to strengthen their ESG strategies and systems. This was achieved through extensive investment client engagement with ministries of finance and economy, central banks, regional and national development banks, commercial banks, private equity and venture capital funds, housing market lenders, special purpose vehicles, sustainable energy, transport, and water development entities to ensure full integration of environmental and social sustainability into commercial financial sector lending operations and public-private partnerships.

Ekaterina also has a solid track record of foundational work that shaped sustainability and ESG as a distinct field within the international banking and investment industry since its inception. For example, she authored pioneering research on banking and sustainability and served on the steering committees and governance bodies of several multi-stakeholder sustainable finance initiatives that brought together banks and investors around solving global challenges (climate, biodiversity/ natural capital, sustainable supply chains etc.), such as Natural Capital Finance Alliance. The Alliance was the foundation upon which current major initiatives are built, such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD).

Ekaterina holds a PhD in Economics, an MBA from the University of Ottawa, Canada, and a degree in business and commerce from Uppsala University in Sweden.