Martina Macpherson

Head, Financial Markets at Value Balancing Alliance (VBA)

Speaker

Martina Macpherson has over 20 years of experience in sustainable finance, impact valuation and investing, across industry, policy, academia and advisory, including senior roles at SIX Group, ODDO BHF Asset Management, S&P Global, MSCI, Lloyds Banking Group and Deutsche Bank.

She is an award-winning sustainability, regulatory and commercial expert, author and entrepreneur, with a strong focus on ESG, FinTech, data and analytics, index construction, benchmarking, and the global growth of sustainable and transition finance.

At S&P Global and MSCI, she worked across ESG research, datasets, portfolio analytics, index and benchmark applications, and client-facing product development. This included the development of ESG, smart beta/factor and thematic indices, such as climate, nature, green finance, long-term value creation and human capital (for TOPIX Japan) concepts, and index-linked products, translating ESG, governance and workforce-related metrics into rules-based index methodologies, selection criteria, weighting logic and investor analytics.

Today, she leads the Financial Markets unit at the Value Balancing Alliance (VBA), overseeing work across impact accounting data, research, analysis, methodology development and financial-markets engagement. Her work is particularly relevant to data-provider and asset-owner partnerships, including universe design and coverage, KPI calibration, scoring logic, financial-materiality mapping, dashboard analytics, portfolio screening, benchmark comparison, index construction, and stewardship use cases.

Martina is an Advisory Board Member of the ESG Liaison Group at the UK Houses of Parliament, a Consultative Working Group Member of ESMA’s Sustainability Standards Committee, a Technical Expert Committee Member to the UK Government on UK Sustainability Reporting Standards, a member of ISO standard-setting groups on Climate Neutrality and Sustainable Finance, and a member of EFRAG’s VSME Standards Community.

She is also a Lecturer at Henley Business School and the University of Zurich and has co-authored books on ESG, sustainability, financial innovation and sustainability reporting, including The AI Book (Wiley, 2020), the Handbook on Species Extinction Accounting and Biodiversity (Routledge, 2022), ESG in Portfolio Analysis (Risk Books, 2022), and the Research Handbook on Sustainability Reporting (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024). She is currently completing a book on Sustainability Assurance (Collins, 2026) and a handbook on Climate Finance (Routledge, 2026)..