The managing partner of Kaizen Consulting, José Roca, has published an article in Levante newspaper on financing sustainable businesses and projects, entitled “If you are sustainable, your financing is guaranteed.” This opinion has been published in the print edition of 23 March as well as the online edition. Click here to read the full article.
José Roca details in this article how this financing breaks records in Spain: “in 2022 it reached 60,134 million euros and grew by 9%, according to data from the Spanish Observatory of Sustainable Financing (Ofiso). But if we focus on sustainable loans and credits, the annual increase has been 64%, and the volume reaches 30 billion euros. It’s no longer an anecdote, but a growing reality. Sustainable finance has an important weight in the market and can be a decisive factor for a company to achieve liquidity. If a company truly meets ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) criteria, it has a better chance of accessing the financing that its business needs.”
Elo, founder of Kaizen Consulting, points out that there is a proliferation of products in the financial market, “that promote sustainable development. Investment funds that apply ESG criteria; solidarity investment funds that dedicate part of their management fee to NGOs or charities; bonds that finance green or solidarity projects and a growing number of investors specialising in renewable energies or projects with a positive environmental impact. They make up a new ecosystem that companies have access to when they truly act green.”That’s why he recommends companies to “know how they should approach their projects and with which entities they can make the most of this circumstance, which is undoubtedly going to be a competitive advantage.”
José Roca gives concrete examples in his article: ‘if your company is looking for financing for a new process that includes recycling, installing solar panels on your premises, making CapEx investments to reduce CO2 emissions in industrial processes or implementing any idea that is developed in the field of ESG, you now have new possibilities to find liquidity. But the key to this is to know how to approach it and where to take your project, not only in the banking sector. There are also alternative financiers who specialise in such investments, who want to put money into these kinds of projects and have experience with them. They will be more receptive to lending to these proposals and in many cases have developed products that are specifically tailored to them.”
As a conclusion to the opinion piece, he stresses that “ESG criteria pay off in the long run because of their effect on climate change and efficient resource management. It’s also profitable in the short and medium term because of the competitive and economic advantages it will bring. The most fundamental one is that it will allow the company to have sufficient liquidity to develop its business plan.” This argument links back to the title: “If you are sustainable, your financing is assured.”
