Awards for Excellence 2019
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For bringing innovation to social and environmental finance, Goldman Sachs receives the award this year as North America’s best bank for sustainable finance. The bank is often recognized as being a key partner for complex deals that, while possibly small, break ground for others to follow. And this is crucial in the field of sustainable finance.
Last year, Goldman Sachs structured a $61 million green issuance for Equilibrium Capital to build a pioneering renewable natural gas project in Arizona. The deal financed a refinery capable of turning dairy waste (one of the largest sources of methane emissions) into vehicle fuel.
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| Kyung-Ah Park |
It also raised $100 million in green bonds last year to finance part of the Clean Rivers Project in the District of Columbia, where the bank has been working for several years in environmental finance, and developed an environmentally focused impact investment fund for the Nature Conservancy.
“It’s important in this field to drive innovation and unlock financial instruments that expand the breadth of capital and bring greater efficiencies to the cost of capital,” says Kyung-Ah Park, head of environmental markets.
Yet the bank is also active in the biggest, more vanilla, green bonds. It was lead bookrunner on Verizon’s inaugural $1 billion green bond earlier this year, for example.
In cities and communities, the bank often takes on projects that others don’t through its Urban Investment Group, led by Margaret Anadu. The bank has financed an extensive regeneration of Newark, New Jersey, for example, from mixed-income housing to job creation to a charter school.
This year Goldman broke ground in Baltimore where it has a financing strategy to create 80,000 new jobs in the city, working with local stakeholders to ensure low-income and minority communities are reached.
Through Imprint Capital, which the firm acquired in 2015, it has $23.7 billion in ESG investments. Last year, Goldman Sachs Asset Management launched an exchangetraded fund with Just Capital, which invests in US large-caps that are driving positive change and are aligned with the values and priorities of the American people as identified through extensive polling.
