Standard Chartered is a global bank connecting corporate, institutional, and affluent clients to a network that offers unique access to sustainable growth opportunities across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
According to Convergence Market Data, Standard Chartered is one of the most active private investors in blended finance, working with multilateral development banks (MDBs), development finance institutions (DFIs), governments, and philanthropy on tailor-made blended finance solutions.
We spoke to John Murton, Senior Sustainability Advisor at Standard Chartered about their Blended Finance Programmes Innovation Hub, gaps and opportunities they see in the field as a commercial investor, how they see their blended finance activities evolving in the future, and much more.
How does Standard Chartered engage in blended finance?
Historically we have approached blended finance on a project-by-project basis, which somewhat limits our opportunity to scale. This is why in 2024 we created the Blended Finance Programmes Team with the goal of establishing programmes that can strategically deploy blended finance solutions at both speed and scale.
This team sits within Standard Chartered’s Innovation Hub, which was launched in 2023 to focus on emerging sustainability themes that are nascent but ripe for growth. Today, we have five thematic areas of innovation: Programmatic Blended Finance, Carbon Market Development, Nature Finance, Circular Economy, and Adaptation and Resilience. The Hub is helping to test and scale solutions to help advance the ecosystem in these emerging thematic areas.
Our Blended Finance Programmes team within the Hub focuses on the delivery of both ‘Country Platforms’ and ‘sectoral partnerships’. On Country Platforms, Standard Chartered supports the Just Energy Transition Partnership processes across our markets, and we’re a signatory (as part of GFANZ) to the Indonesia and Vietnam JETP, pledging to at least match initial donor pledges sized at $10 billion and $7.75 billion respectively. In 2025 we acted as lead arranger for the Saguling floating solar project in Indonesia; the first project to be financed under the JETP.
In addition to supporting these already established country platforms, we are working to support the creation and development of new country platforms that address the unique needs of our markets when it comes to financing the transition. We are the only private institution to sign up to the Bangladesh Climate and Development Platform focused on both mitigation and adaption. We are also mandated to advance Lesotho’s Just Energy Transition process – the first private-sector led country platform.
On partnerships, we are actively engaging with MDBs and DFIs with the aim of establishing strategic partnership frameworks that will catalyze capital and unlock financing for multiple projects. We expect to announce some exciting partnerships over the next year!
Can you describe one or two blended finance transactions that Standard Chartered has been involved in? In what capacity did it participate?
In September, colleagues in Standard Chartered’s Development and Agencies Finance team successfully structured a first-of-a-kind EUR 433 million Sustainability-Linked Loan for the Ministry of Finance and Budget, Republic of Cote d’Ivoire. The loan was supported by the World Bank Group, acting through the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA). Standard Chartered acted as sole lender and mandated lead arranger.
This landmark facility was the first ever transaction to combine both first-loss and second loss guarantees from IBRD and MIGA, marking a significant milestone for the World Bank Group’s new Guarantee Platform. IBRD’s first loss policy-based guarantee and MIGA’s second-loss non-honouring of sovereign financial obligations were combined to achieve a total comprehensive World Bank cover level of 95%.
Arranged under Côte d’Ivoire’s Sustainability-Linked Financing Framework launched in June 2025, the sustainability-linked loan was structured to include a margin ratchet, linking financial conditions to clear sustainability performance targets in renewable energy (excluding hydropower), deforestation prevention, and reforestation. The framework will support efforts to meet the country’s goal to reduce carbon emissions by over 30% by 2030 and is expected to help boost resilience to climate impacts relating to agriculture. Furthermore, the incentive structure enabled the government to access long-term, competitive, and essential financing to advance their national climate resilience agenda. The transaction effectively showcases how collaborative innovation can help mobilize capital efficiently and support credible models for sovereign sustainable finance that can be replicated.
Looking to Asia, in 2024 Standard Chartered was the lead arranger in the refinancing of an IBRD loan to the State Bank of India (SBI) to support India’s national Grid-Connected Rooftop Solar (GPRV) programme. Originally launched in 2016, the programme, through SBI on-lending, funds photovoltaic installations to commercial and industrial consumers, that provide clean energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by displacing more expensive and carbon-intensive thermal generation.
The refinancing transaction included a 95% comprehensive guarantee from MIGA to protect against the risk of non-honouring of financial obligations by a state-owned enterprise for up to 10 years. By guaranteeing the refinancing, this project showcases an ‘originate to refinance’ model, an approach recommended by the Private Sector Investment Lab, launched by the World Bank Group in June 2023 to identify barriers and find potential solutions to unlock private investment in developing countries. Furthermore, by transferring portfolio risk from the World Bank balance sheet, following the initial de-risking of a nascent sector, to commercial lenders it frees up World Bank capacity to lend into new sectors and projects. The financing successfully helped SBI to reduce its borrowing costs and diversify its sources of borrowing.
How do you measure the impact of your blended finance activities? What does that impact look like?
We’ve been publishing our Sustainable Finance Impact Report since 2020 to highlight the tangible impact of this work, and key outcomes across our markets. This report quantifies the environmental and social outcomes of our sustainable finance activities, ranging from renewable energy capacity installed to social infrastructure supported. Importantly, the report is subject to external assurance and aligned to ICMA’s Harmonised Framework for Impact Reporting. In 2024 we were proud to report a Sustainable Finance asset portfolio of $23.3 billion across 439 projects in 51 markets. This was a 32% year-on-year increase from $17.6 billion in 2023.
Blended finance transactions are currently not covered in our sustainable finance impact report in their own right. Such transactions are inherently complex - and often bespoke - structuring solutions that can be difficult to capture systematically. However, there is significant overlap between our sustainable finance work and our blended finance work across the bank as both aim to advance high-impact projects that deliver meaningful sustainable development outcomes. In many cases, projects supported through blended finance solutions will already be reflected within our sustainable finance impact reporting, including key metrics such as jobs created, emissions avoided, renewable energy capacity etc.
Looking ahead, our intention is to evolve our approach by potentially consolidating impact measurement for transactions across our innovation hub, featuring our blended finance programmes, debt-for-nature swaps, and outcome-based bonds for example. This would enable the Hub to set targets that can be more clearly measured, tracked, and reported. For the Blended Finance Programmes team this may include, in addition to those metrics above, the blended finance effectiveness of the transaction, such as dollars of private sector money mobilized per concessional dollar. We would expect to apply the same principles we use today: portfolio-level reporting and project-level reporting, attribution of impacts based on our financing share, and a commitment to transparency and credibility. That means being clear about whether impacts are realized or estimated, avoiding double-counting, and disclosing the methodologies used where estimates are applied.
As a commercial investor in the blended finance space, what gaps/opportunities do you see in the blended finance market? What unique challenges do you face while engaging with public and/or philanthropic investors?
We still see instances where private sector lending is being crowded out, and not efficiently mobilized, even in sectors and regions which are commercially viable. Blended finance must evolve so that each dollar of concessional funding mobilizes more private sector capital. The IIF’s ‘Lifting Prudential Barriers to Mobilizing Private Capital for Development Finance’ Policy Paper highlighted that every dollar every dollar committed by MDBs has only mobilized 50 cents of private capital in recent years. This must grow very significantly. To achieve this, we need to make better use of effective de-risking tools such as first loss guarantees and price support mechanisms. And we need to structure de-risking mechanisms so that lenders become comfortable with certain risks and concessional funding over time becomes less necessary.
At the same time, we are currently seeing an increase of blended finance solutions and models that have worked. Reports such as the Sustainable Markets Initiative and Investor Leadership Network’s ‘Blended Finance Best Practice’ and Convergence’s Scale Private Investment Mobilization Project have been standout example of collating such efforts. There is a real opportunity to now take such solutions and replicate and scale into new themes and markets.
To maximize these efforts, we must engage new types of investors such as philanthropies, sovereign wealth funds and local capital markets, that can play critical roles across the life cycle of blended finance solutions. For example, philanthropies are able to contribute in the short term with much needed grants and technical assistance to get projects off the ground and create a viable and investable model. Sovereign wealth funds can invest in projects with long-term patient capital which provides stability and security for investors. Local Capital Markets can then offer exit strategies and help projects to refinance at better rates, freeing up capital to be recycled into new projects. The size of these untapped pools of capital is staggering and will be key to ensuring the future resilience of blended finance solutions in light of recent geo-political shifts and to widening the pools of supply. According to Africa Finance Corporation’s recent ‘State of Africa’s Infrastructure Report 2025’ there are over $4 trillion in domestic resources on the African continent which are not currently being leveraged.
How do you see Standard Chartered blended finance activities evolving in the future?
Standard Chartered is committed to effectively deploying blended finance solutions to themes and geographies where it is most needed to help make projects bankable and crowd in private sector investment. We want to continue to be at or near the top of Convergence’s league tables, evidencing efforts to use blended finance to support our sustainable finance goals, and long-term value creation for our markets. As our CEO has said, sustainable finance isn’t just business that’s good, it’s good business.
One opportunity we are currently very excited about is our mandate with ‘His Majesty King Letsie III Just Energy Transition Limited’ an SPV looking to form a first-of-a-kind private sector led country platform in Lesotho. The initiative, endorsed by His Majesty and the government, is designed to mobilize different pools of capital to finance a portfolio of both generation and transmission projects to support the delivery of Lesotho’s NDC and Mission300 Compact. The opportunity represents a unique case study for a land-locked least developed country to leapfrog from an energy importer to an exporter of clean power, supporting domestic and regional energy stability and security.
Similarly, we see great potential for the Innovation hub to continue to incubate new and exciting blended finance solutions to support emerging themes within the sustainability ecosystem such as adaptation financing and circular economy projects. Watch this space!
