Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) treats sustainability as a matter of business strategy rather than long-term ambition, and that is why it takes Africa’s best bank for ESG award. Over 2025, FirstRand’s corporate and investment banking arm cleared a facilitation target a year before it fell due, arranged the largest and most technically demanding sustainable transactions in its market, and advised on the framework now being used to pull development finance capital into the continent’s hard-to-abate sectors.
The division assesses and classifies every client and every facility on a four-colour climate scale – green, olive, grey and brown. As of December 2025, the continued growth of green and olive assets, has placed RMB on a strong trajectory towards achieving a target of 40% by 2030. Power generation carries a targeted minimum 80% renewable energy mix by 2030, aligned to a Science Based Targets initiative well-below-2°C pathway, and financed emissions are committed to net zero by 2050.
Social is particularly important in Africa. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve teased out and established a standalone social finance ambition
Nigel Beck
The mobilisation numbers follow. The bank facilitated the cumulative ZAR200 billion of sustainable and transition finance FirstRand had promised by 2026 ahead of deadline, and the target has since been replaced with an ambition to reach ZAR450 billion by 2030. In calendar year 2025, RMB facilitated ZAR80.7 billion across 77 loans and bonds, up from ZAR70.8 billion across 64 the year before. Sustainable finance advances climbed from 14% of the investment banking division’s total advances in June 2024 to 23% by December 2025.
Structures that travel
RMB was sole mandated lead arranger and sustainability coordinator on Mediclinic’s ZAR9 billion syndicated sustainability-linked loan in October 2025, South Africa’s largest syndicated sustainable finance transaction to date, priced against emissions, water and landfill-diversion targets. A $21 million social loan for Bandwidth and Cloud Services in June moved a wholesale telecoms builder off development finance and onto commercial capital.
“If we talk exclusively to green or climate, there’s quite often a bit of questioning, people raise the imperatives within Africa, what about the social elements?” says Nigel Beck, head of sustainable finance and ESG advisory. “Social is particularly important in Africa. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve teased out and established a standalone social finance ambition.”
In bonds, RMB arranged FirstRand’s inaugural Women in Business social bond in March 2025, raising ZAR2.5 billion on bids of nearly three times cover. A 15 basis point penalty applies if proceeds are not deployed to eligible projects within 24 months. The same discipline governs the group’s ZAR3 billion sustainability bond in June and the Industrial Development Corporation’s ZAR2.2 billion sustainability bond in October, the latter carrying a second-party opinion from ISS Corporate.
The team behind it, led by Beck, spends as much time making a market as serving one. “In our space we have to be proactive with clients and say, we think you’ve got an opportunity, we think you can structure it like this as such,” he says. “It’s not like in Europe, where people come to you and say we want a green loan. You do a lot more origination and awareness-raising and market-building.”
RMB spent the review period piloting Endura, an ESG and climate data platform built to fix the problem that stops most African sustainable lending before it starts: lack of data. Rather than keep it proprietary, RMB is opening it to rival banks as a shared industry standard.
FirstRand’s transition finance framework, published in December 2025 with RMB as exclusive transition finance adviser and validated by Moody’s, is also the first the bank is aware of globally to align with both the ICMA Climate Transition Bond Guidelines and the LMA Guide to Transition Loans. RMB has also closed against it a $150 million facility from British International Investment, the first of its kind for Africa, funding transition loans in industrials, energy and cement across the continent.
The bank also acted as sustainability coordinator to South Africa’s National Treasury on its sustainable funding framework, contributed to the country’s green taxonomy, and has done comparable work with stock exchanges in Botswana and Zambia.
