Martina Macpherson

Head, Financial Markets at Value Balancing Alliance (VBA)

Speaker

Martina Macpherson has over 20 years of experience in (sustainable) finance, risk and resilience management, (impact) accounting 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 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. Her work included the development of ESG, smart beta/factor and thematic indices spanning climate, nature, green finance, long-term value creation and human capital (for TOPIX Japan), as well as index-linked products, translating ESG, governance and workforce-related metrics into rules-based 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 and valuation, data, research, analytics, methodology development and financial-markets engagement.

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 Standing Committee, a member of the UK Sustainability Reporting Standards Technical Advisory Committee, a member of ISO standard-setting groups on Climate Neutrality and Sustainable Finance, and a member of EFRAG’s VSME Standards Community.

She is a Jury Member for the Portfolio Institutionell Awards and a Visiting Fellow and Guest Lecturer at Henley Business School and the University of Zurich. She 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 has just completed a book on Sustainability Assurance (Collins, 2026) and a handbook on Climate Finance (Routledge, 2027).