Breaking the Barriers to Climate Risk Innovation

Holly joined Howden in 2024 as a Director in Howden’s Financial Institutions business leading on Sustainable Finance Solutions. Working with banks and the broader finance community, Holly identifies and structures risk transfer solutions that enable greater and more efficient capital deployment towards decarbonisation and transition projects. 

Prior to Howden, Holly spent a decade as a Debt Capital Markets and Derivatives specialist at NatWest, managing a portfolio FTSE100 Infrastructure and project finance sponsors with their financing and risk management needs. Whilst at NatWest, Holly was offered a secondment to the Sustainable Markets Initiative as Sustainable Investment Director where she focused on blended finance and de-risking solutions to scale private sector investment in the transition to net zero.

Ingrid Holmes is Deputy CEO of the Green Finance Institute. She joined GFI in 2021 from Federated Hermes, where she was a Director in the Responsible Investment Team and led the development of the firm’s first Nero Zero Policy. She previously held roles at dedicated low carbon asset manager Climate Change Capital, and also climate diplomacy thinktank E3G, where she established and built their Sustainable Finance Programme. She also held roles as an Adviser in the UK Parliament and in the UK’s environment department DEFRA. 

She has 20 years of experience working on environmental policy and sustainable finance. She has previously served as a Member of the European Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance and ran the Secretariat for the Green Finance Taskforce, which led to the establishment of the Green Finance Institute. Her abiding passion is the development of institutional, policy and financial solutions to scale investment into climate change solutions. 

Ingrid has a BSc in Biological Sciences (Hons Zoology) from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in Environmental Technology from Imperial College London.

As President of GARP Risk Institute, Jo Paisley helps lead research and thought leadership for GARP and the broader risk community.

Jo Paisley’s career began at the Bank of England where she worked in various economist roles, ran the Statistics Division and spent the last part of her career in Supervision. Her last role was as a Director of the Supervisory Risk Specialist Division within the Prudential Regulation Authority. This area provided deep technical risk expertise to front line supervisors across all risk disciplines, covering banking and insurance. She was also heavily involved in the design and execution of the UK’s first concurrent stress test in 2014.

She left the Bank in 2015 and joined HSBC as their Global Head of Stress Testing, where she was responsible for ensuring that they met all their regulatory stress testing requirements around the world. She has also worked as an independent stress testing consultant, advising firms on how to get the most value out of stress testing. Jo studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, before completing her MPhil in Economics at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Maiko is Head of Undaunted’s Greenhouse Accelerator, supporting early-stage ClimateTech startups as they scale from lab to market. Undaunted is the UK’s leading climate innovation hub, founded by Imperial College London and The Royal Institution.

He has co-founded and been part of the early teams of multiple startups. He is the Founder of Impact Hustlers, a global network of 7,500+ impact-driven founders, investors, and leaders.

Previously, Maiko was Head of Programme at Founders Forum’s Founders Academy, ran Wayra’s London accelerator, worked as an Innovation Project Manager at Telefónica Germany, and taught customer development and product innovation at UCL and the Public School of Technology.

Michael Sheren is a Global Green Finance, Governance and Policy Leader. He is a Former Bank of England Senior Advisor and G20 Co-Chairman of the Sustainable Finance Study Group. He is a Fellow at the Cambridge University Institute of Sustainable Leadership, a Senior Advisor to the UNDP sustainable finance hub and a member of the group of Experts on sustainable governance at the World Economic Forum. 

Michael is an experienced corporate Non-Executive Director and Senior Advisor across sectors and jurisdictions, and he has over 25 years of experience in global Investment banking based in New York and London. Michael holds master’s degrees from Harvard University, the London School of Economics and New York University and an Undergraduate degree from the George Washington University.