ESG & Sustainable Investing

Magnus Billing is the CEO of Alecta. Alecta’s assets under management amount to approximately US$90 billion, provides collectively agreed occupational pensions and is owned by approximately 2.4 million private customers and 34,000 corporate clients. Since 2016 Mr Billing was appointed as a member of the European Commissions’  High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance.  Prior to joining Alecta, Mr Billing was the CEO of Nasdaq Nordics, and Head of Fixed Income Nordic and Baltic Markets. Mr Billing has served as Director at the Federation of European Securities Exchanges, Swedish House of Finance and as an Alternate Director of the Swedish Corporate Governance Code Board of Directors. He holds a Law degree from Stockholm University.

Nasreen Kasenally is the Chief Risk Officer of UBS Asset Management & UBS EMEA and Head of Sustainability Risk. She is a Senior Risk professional with over 23 years of experience mostly at UBS covering investment banking, asset and wealth management in New York and London.    

In her role as Chief Risk Officer, Nasreen is responsible for all financial risks within UBS Asset Management globally and in all the business divisions of UBS Group in EMEA. As Head of Sustainability Risk, she has the oversight of the risks across the group and leads the engagement and positioning to deliver the firm’s purpose and values with regards to sustainability.   

Nasreen is very active in championing Diversity, Equity & Inclusive initiatives, mentoring social entrepreneurs and sponsoring global projects. 

  She has a master’s degree in Mathematical Trading & Finance from Cass Business School and a bachelor’s degree in Actuarial Science from the University of Kent. 

Sally has over 18 years of banking experience, predominately in public finance. She currently serves as the head of Wells Fargo Securities head of higher education and co-head of the education and nonprofit group and previously as co-head of the Morgan Stanley higher education group. Sally has served as a senior banker on over $25 billion of tax-exempt and taxable debt issuance for public and private institutions nationwide and internationally. Sally’s prominent senior managed public university clients include the University of Texas System, the California State University System among others . Her private university and college higher education experience includes senior managed bond issues for Stanford University, Princeton University, Harvard University, Columbia University, California Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University and Sally'’s not-for-profit experience includes bond issues for the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art among others. She recently headed Wells Fargo as the lead underwriter for the issue of Ford Foundation's  Social Bond in the U.S. taxable corporate bond market — effectively borrowing $1 billion , which is now seen as the ignition point for distributing badly needed cash to nonprofits during the pandemic. 

Sven Gentner is head of the unit for Asset Management in the European Commission's directorate-general for financial stability, financial services and capital markets union.

Sven joined the European Commission in 2004 and has served in various positions in its Brussels headquarters and abroad. From 2004-2006 he was responsible for the coordination of the EU-US Financial Markets Regulatory Dialogue, in 2006 he served as a member of the private office (cabinet) of Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, from 2007-2011 he was executive assistant to the director-general of Directorate General Internal Market and Services with special responsibility for financial services. In 2011 he was seconded to the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa to advise the AUC on building an African internal market. From 2012 to 2013 he was head of the unit for human resources and planning in DG Internal Market and Services. From 2013 to 2015, Sven was a counsellor in the Economic and Financial Affairs Section of the Delegation of the European Union to the United States. He dealt with EU-US regulatory issues and TTIP negotiations in financial services. 

Sven holds masters degrees in economics from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, and the University of York, UK. 

Alice Hill is the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her work at CFR focuses on the risks, consequences, and responses associated with climate change. Hill previously served as special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff where she led the development of national policy to build resilience to catastrophic risks, including climate change and biological threats. Prior to this, Hill served as senior counselor to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in which she led the formulation of DHS's first-ever climate adaptation plan and the development of strategic plans regarding catastrophic biological and chemical threats, including pandemics. Earlier in her career, she was a supervising judge on both the Los Angeles Municipal and Superior Courts as well as a federal prosecutor and chief of the white-collar crime unit at the United States Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, California. Oxford University Press published her coauthored book, Building a Resilient Tomorrow, in 2019. She currently serves on the boards of the Environmental Defense Fund and Munich Re Group’s U.S.-based companies. In 2020, Yale University and the Op-Ed Project awarded her the Public Voices Fellowship on the Climate Crisis. Hill’s new book, The Fight For Climate After COVID-19, will be published in summer 2021.

Lisa Sachs is the Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment. Since joining CCSI in 2008, she established and now oversees CCSI’s robust research portfolio in its cross-cutting areas of expertise, and has overseen advisory work in Chile, Guinea, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Paraguay, Tanzania and Timor-Leste, among other countries. She teaches a masters seminar at Columbia Law School and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs on Extractive Industries and Sustainable Development, and lectures at Externado University in Colombia on International Investment Law. She has served on World Economic Forum Global Future Councils on International Governance and on Mining & Metals, and is a co-chair of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s thematic group on the Good Governance of Extractive and Land Resources. She is a 2020-2021 Senior Fellow of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, and sits on several advisory boards, including of the Investor Alliance for Human Rights and SDGAcademy. Before joining CCSI, she worked at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility and at Amnesty USA, in both cases on shareholder engagement. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Harvard University, and earned her Juris Doctor and a Masters degree in International Affairs from Columbia University, where she was a James Kent Scholar and recipient of the Parker School Certificate in International and Comparative Law.  

Maria Lombardo is the European Head of ESG Client Strategies at Invesco. Maria has more than 25 years’ experience, serving as a manager director in investment banking and equity capital markets. In recent years Maria followed her passion for sustainability and became an expert in responsible investing and sustainable finance. Maria joined Invesco in 2018 from CDP, the environmental disclosure not-for-profit organisation, where she was global coordinator of their investor initiative group.

Maria spent most of her earlier career as an investment analyst in corporate finance and private equity, with Lazard in Milan and then British Development Finance Institution CDC Group in London. Maria worked on investment projects in Africa, South America and India, extensively travelling around the poorest countries in the world, assessing investment opportunities. She was involved in agribusiness and infrastructural investments in Ecuador, Ivory Coast, India and Uganda among others, dealing with various types of investments from loans to private equities.

From the late nineties, Maria progressed into capital markets in sales and relationship management for emerging market equities, with prominent European investment banks UBS, Sberbank and Unicredit, where she was a Managing Director, heading the emerging market equity group.

Maria graduated from Bocconi University in Milan and holds a certificate in Responsible Investing at the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership and a CEMS MBA at UCLL in Brussels and Bocconi. She is a board of director at the London Women’s Forum, an investor members organisation promoting women’s careers in finance.

Piers Haben is responsible for the EBA's work on banking markets, innovation and consumers. He leads teams that look at the reporting and loan management, financial technology and innovation, capital markets developments, payments systems and consumers. Until 2018, Piers was responsible for the EBA's risk infrastructure and stress testing work as well as supervisory convergence across the EU. Prior to joining the EBA, Piers worked for the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom, where he held a number of roles related to prudential policy and supervision, including leading the FSA's policy work on stress testing and the supervisory review of firms under the second pillar of the Basel Accords. Piers Haben also has covered a number of positions of international relevance, in particular through his membership within the Basel Committee's Supervision and Implementation Group, his work in the Financial Stability Forum and his advisory role for the South African Reserve Bank.

David Semaya is Executive Chairman of SUMITOMO MITSUI TRUST ASSET MANAGEMENT Co., Ltd.

His thirty year career spans three continents in executive leadership roles in financial services across the US, Europe, and Asia. Now based in Tokyo, he joined SuMiTAM in April 2018.

Previously, David served as Executive Chairman of Nikko Asset Management for four years both in London and in Tokyo. Prior to returning to Japan, he was with Barclays PLC as CEO of UK and Ireland Wealth Management, and Chairman of Barclays Asset Management Ltd. Prior to 2009, he served as CEO for Barclays Global Investors (now Blackrock) Europe and Asia. Until 2004, David was with Merrill Lynch and Co. in a variety of executive leadership positions in both Asset Management and Investment Banking in New York and Tokyo.

David was also formerly a Trustee Director for one of Europe’s largest pension funds and served on the board of the Investment Association and the Wealth Management Association (UK). He currently serves as Chairman of the ICI Pacific Policy Council.

David holds a BA from The University of Florida, a Masters in Education from Temple University and has completed the Stanford/NUS Executive Program in International Management.

He is a dual US/UK National and is fluent in the Japanese language.