Crédit Agricole takes this year’s award on the strength of a run of market-first transactions across Asia, executed by one of the region’s longest established sustainable finance teams.
Anchored in Hong Kong and expanded through 2025 into Japan, India, the Philippines and Australia, the team has doubled in size since 2017 and worked on around 100 sustainable bond transactions over that period.
That depth shows in the league tables: Crédit Agricole climbed to second for Asia-Pacific international green, social, sustainability and sustainability-linked bonds in 2025, up from fifth a year earlier.
“Last year was the best one ever for the franchise in Asia in terms of volumes, revenues and the quality of transactions. In a muted market environment, we were able to significantly increase our market share while continuing to deliver landmark sustainable finance transactions across the region. It is a testament to our market-leading expertise and deep industry knowledge,” says Antoine Rose, head of sustainable banking for Asia-Pacific and Middle East.
Fostering sustainable finance market development is part of our job as a market leader. We contribute to taxonomies, industry initiatives and market standards because we believe that developing the ecosystem is as important as executing transactions
Antoine Rose
Its clearest distinction, however, is the number of firsts it structured across the region. Crédit Agricole was the only foreign bank to help prepare China’s sovereign green bond framework. It then acted as green structuring adviser, joint lead manager and joint bookrunner on the Ministry of Finance’s debut international green bond – a RMB6 billion ($883 million) issue in London in April.
In Hong Kong, it remains the only bank mandated as joint structuring bank and joint global coordinator across all 10 rounds of the government’s institutional green bonds since 2019 and stayed lead left on the third tokenised issuance in November. It was sole dealer on Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power’s HKD1.166 billion ($149 million) bond – the first international green nuclear bond from an Asian issuer – and sole sustainability adviser on Shinhan Bank’s JPY40 billion ($248 million) transaction, the world’s first Samurai transition bond.
“One of our differentiating factors is the high level of integration between Asia and Europe. We bring the world-class expertise, internationally aligned standards and vision for sustainable finance that we have developed in Paris and across Europe, while adapting them to local market needs in Asia,” says Rose.
New instruments, new markets
The pattern extended into climate adaptation and the hardest-to-abate sectors. The bank was joint bookrunner on Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s €300 million note, the world’s first resilience bond certified under the Climate Bonds Standard, and pioneered Asia’s first green loans in shipping, for Evergreen Marine’s methanol dual-fuel containerships, and in cement, through Taiwan Cement’s €500 million facility.
In data centres it structured AirTrunk’s SGD2.25 billion ($1.74 billion) green loan, Singapore’s largest-ever loan and the first aligned with the data centre criteria of the Singapore-Asia Taxonomy. Its geographic reach widened too, with a $1 billion green bond for India’s Greenko and the first sustainability-linked loan from a low-cost carrier in Southeast Asia, for Cebu Pacific.
Underpinning the deal flow is the bank’s role in writing the region’s rulebooks. Crédit Agricole contributed to the Hong Kong and Singapore-Asia taxonomies, sits on the ICMA and LMA committees, and is the only French cornerstone bank in the HKMA-IFC Alliance for Green Commercial Banks. Its newly formed environmental transition group delivered what the bank reports as the industry’s highest net green-to-fossil syndication fees ratio in 2025, while integrating sectoral decarbonisation trajectories across client portfolios.
“Fostering sustainable finance market development is part of our job as a market leader. We contribute to taxonomies, industry initiatives and market standards because we believe that developing the ecosystem is as important as executing transactions, and we will continue to do so going forward,” Rose adds.
That commitment holds through the wider ESG retreat. Crédit Agricole reaffirmed its climate pledges under a new 2028 plan targeting a 90/10 green-to-brown asset ratio, said it would not finance deep-sea mining ahead of June’s UN Ocean Conference, and reports its oil and gas financed emissions are already down 70% from 2020 – close to its 2030 target five years early.
