The winners have been announced for the 2023 Environmental Finance Bond Awards, which celebrate the leading green, social, sustainability and sustainability-linked (GSSS) bond and loan deals in 2022 and recognise significant market participants.
The 2023 awards attracted more than 360 entries across 72 updated categories, including a Transition bond of the year category, and a Lead manager of the year, transition bonds category, amid continuing interest for transition bond issuance.
The diversity of the winners revealed the impressive reach that the GSSS bond market has achieved in recent years. As well as from Europe and North America, winners were drawn from Chile to Japan, and Uruguay to Brazil.
The most frequent winner in the 2023 awards was BNP Paribas, which picked up five of the 18 lead manager awards on offer. HSBC and NatWest Markets, however, also collected a crop of lead manager awards – with three each.
Herman Kamil, Uruguay's head of the sovereign debt management office at the Ministry of Economy and Finance, won the award for Personality of the year as the leader of the team that created the first sovereign sustainability-linked bond (SSLB) with a two-way coupon.
The awards were reviewed by an independent panel of judges from the investment community, with the full winners list now available here.
The award winner write-ups were put together by Thomas Cox, Michael Hurley, Annabelle Palmer, Ahren Lester, Genevieve Redgrave and Matt Ford.
"The award winners provide a wonderful snapshot of the spectacular innovation and activity occurring in the sustainable finance market today, and Environmental Finance is delighted to congratulate all the winners for their success – and thank the judges for their hard work in reviewing the hundreds of entries," said Annabelle Palmer, content strategist of Environmental Finance.
"While 2022 was a challenging year for the market, we look forward to watching how the market continues to evolve and innovate in 2023 – laying the groundwork for the future award winners in 2024."
Many of the winners will be speaking at Environmental Finance's ESG in Fixed Income EMEA 2023 conference, which will be held in-person on 17 April 2023 in London. See details here.