The Institute of International Finance focuses its advocacy, research and convening power on key topics of importance to our members, including sustainable finance, digital finance, risk and regulation, and debt. IIF is committed to providing our members with events, webinars, roundtables, workshops, podcasts, research reports and more to help them stay ahead of the curve.
The IIF identifies and promotes capital markets solutions that support the development and growth of sustainable finance, with transition finance and blended finance as key components. We partner with representatives from major institutional investors, commercial banks, insurance companies, ratings agencies, as well as public sector collaborators to scale the sustainable finance market, globally, and help shape official sector initiatives that address the environmental, social and governance concerns impacting the finance industry. In addition, the IIF advocates for sustainable finance policies that prioritize prudential risk management, financial stability, and economic growth.
The IIF is leading efforts to help our members and the public sector understand and leverage the technology-driven transformations reshaping financial services. We focus on distributed ledger technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning, quantum computing, data policy, digital identity, cloud, and other technologies. Our industry-leading work on digital asset regulation engages global standard setting bodies and central banks to help understand and shape the development of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and private tokenization solutions. We advocate for financial services innovation as well as making cross-border payments more efficient and our events bring together senior public sector officials, financial services leaders, and technology experts.
The IIF is the leading voice for the financial services industry on global regulatory and policy issues. The IIF engages continuously and constructively with global standard setters and other policymakers through formal submissions, staff papers and reports, as well as through regular dialogue, targeted events, industry surveys, and podcasts. We help shape the global policy and regulatory agenda by providing industry input and feedback on critical issues such as sustainable finance, international capital and liquidity standards for banks and insurers, resolution, non-bank financial intermediation, accounting standards, combatting financial crime, operational resilience, cyber security, and crypto-assets.
The IIF promotes global efforts to enhance the global debt architecture and closely monitors the rapidly evolving sectoral debt dynamics across mature and emerging markets, with particular emphasis on sovereign debt. In addition, the IIF works to implement the Principles for Stable Capital Flows and Fair Debt Restructuring – a set of guidelines formulated by a working group of representatives of emerging market borrowers and their official and private creditors.
In response to the request for a waiver from private lenders stating that a request from sovereign borrowers for forbearance from official creditors would not constitute an event of default, we are very pleased to published this “G20 DSSI Template Waiver Letter Agreement.”
After a challenging Q1, emerging and frontier market international bond issuance picked up significantly in Q2. High yield sovereign borrowers have been accessing the market; borrowing costs are well below peak Q1 levels. We see robust issuance in most emerging and frontier markets, though sub-Saharan African borrowers are notably absent.
Daniel Shurey, Vice President of Sustainable Finance Americas at ING, joined Sonja Gibbs, MD and Head of Sustainable Finance at the IIF, on this week's ESG Webinar to provide an update on the sustainable debt market.
Informed by our working group discussions, this letter is meant to frame the accompanying Terms of Reference for private sector consideration of borrower requests within the DSSI.