Hi. I'm Matt Brundage here at Bridgehouse. And I'm speaking today with Steve Liberatore, who is the Head of ESG/Impact, Global Fixed Income at Nuveen and portfolio manager for the Nuveen Global Green Bond Fund. Steve, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Matt. Steve, you and your team in Nuveen is one of the largest fixed income managers in the world, one of the largest green bond investors.
And you're known for backing a number of prominent green bond issues, such as the world's first Blue Bonds, the World Bank's Rhino Bond, the Vietnam Clean Water Emissions Reduction Bond, and many others. Can you speak about how you work with issuers, underwriters and a lot of other stakeholders to really become the anchor investor in these types of deals?
Sure. You know, we're very fortunate we have been managing assets in this manner for almost 20 years at this point, and we've been working off of our own proprietary Impact framework, which we've put in place since 2007. It's something myself and our current head of responsible investing, Amy O'Brien, created, and it has put us in a position where it's given us expertise and some experience.
And because of that, issuers, underwriters tend to want to come to us to talk to us about transactions and having structures put in place that we would be interested in. And I think it's a great opportunity for us to really represent, for our investors what we see is the best in the market, how we can continue to evolve this market in a positive manner. And for us, that is always focusing in on the concepts of transparency and disclosure.
For us, an Impact investment has to have a direct and measurable social and/or environmental impact associated with them. And next to, of course, financial performance being the utmost key. And when we're doing our evaluation, that direct and measurable concept allows for us to look across structures, across sectors and up and down the capital stack. Would there be a, like, a specific example of how you get involved in anchoring some of these deals?
Sure. You know, most recently, there has been a potential new debt for nature swap in the marketplace, and that is a structure. It's very complex, but it essentially, allows a sovereign issuer who may be having some financial distress to reduce its debt burden by providing commitments for conservation projects. But it's a fairly complex structure that has some blended finance components to it. And we are often we've been very active in that space.
There's a new, as I mentioned, is a new potential one in the marketplace. And the advisor for this particular issuer, reached out to 26 different investment banks, and 18 of those reached out to us to discuss what we would want to see in the transaction, to potentially be the lead investor.
So again, it's a great opportunity for us to represent for our clients what it is we want to see in a transaction, how the proceeds are going to be utilized, the requisite Impact data that we'll want to see back. And then as well what the underlying structure looks like.
And ultimately, the valuation in an over-the-counter market like fixed income, the opportunity to influence the creation of a structure really puts you in a really strong position to hopefully generate attractive excess return over time. Thank you, Steve, for that very powerful example. Great speaking with you today. Thanks, Matt.