A journey to sustainable investing began right at home for Martin Diaz Plata

Martin Diaz Plata’s journey to sustainable investing was a long one, he says, but in one sense it was always right on his doorstep.

“When you experience poverty and inequality, the issue of sustainability is something that never goes away,” says Diaz Plata, who was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia and today is the head of private equity investments at BlueOrchard, an impact-investment management firm.

He went from Colombia the country to Columbia the university 30 years ago, earned an MBA and cut his teeth at Donaldson Lufkin and Jenrette. After a decade there he moved to London to work on Capital Group’s Latin American business and stayed there for another 20 years.

“But then in the last few years I’ve been intrigued about impact investing, about how to solve problems that affect society. I wanted to tackle the issues directly,” Diaz Plata told me in an interview on a recent episode of The Impact on FinTech TV.

“And when I found out about the fund that I currently have, which is a climate insurance fund, I thought this is one of the ways. We need to protect people from the impact of climate [change]. It’s a good way to start my journey into impact investing. It’s only a year and three months. So I’m just getting started on the world of impact and climate,” he said.

When people think about insurance for climate change, catastrophe bonds are generally what comes to mind. But Diaz Plata is working to broaden the climate-insurance field, including coverage of agricultural crops and business interruptions due to flooding.

“We should not forget that millions of people are impacted every year by climate catastrophes that unfortunately are becoming more frequent and more extreme. So that is still an important part,” he said. “(But) climate insurance is also about how people can continue in their daily lives without interruption and frankly without failure because that failure impacts not only them but also the whole economy of our country.”

Diaz Plata also spoke about BlueOrchard’s impact on more then 70 million people worldwide and the challenges of raising funds for impact investing. Watch the entire interview with Martin Diaz Plata.

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