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The relationship between sustainability, financial inclusion, and private credit is a topic that continues to attract increasing attention across Emerging Asia.
While sustainability is often discussed through the lens of climate action, emissions reduction, and the energy transition, the conversation in Emerging Asia may be broader. Questions around access to credit, economic resilience, and financial inclusion are often closely linked to long-term sustainable development. For MSMEs in particular, access to appropriate financing can influence not only business growth, but also their ability to navigate uncertainty and participate more fully in the region's economic progress.
These themes formed the basis of a recent discussion hosted by Helicap through its webinar, Credit Where It's Due: Financing Impact in Emerging Asia, featuring perspectives from Meeta Misra (Chief Sustainability Officer, Helicap Group) and Cheryl Tay (Director, Sales & Partnerships, Helicap Securities). The session explored how sustainability is being understood in the regional context, where private credit may fit into the picture, and what investors are increasingly looking for when assessing impact and financial outcomes.
For those who were unable to join the session, we hope the insights from the video offer a useful starting point for the key themes discussed.
[00:03] Welcome and Opening
Over the past few years, investor questions have shifted — from "what are the returns?" to "who are you lending to?", "how do you screen your originators?", and "what does your portfolio look like from a financial inclusion standpoint?" The session covers the investor landscape, what sustainability means in this region, the performance evidence, and how the conversation and infrastructure around it have changed.
[01:57] Introductions and Background
Cheryl brings a background in private banking across Asian clients. Meeta started out in traditional finance and fund management before transitioning into sustainable finance and impact investing eight years ago. Both describe how investor demand has shaped Helicap's evolution on sustainability — institutional LPs and DFIs are no longer asking just about returns, but about lending criteria, originator screening, and what the portfolio looks like from a financial inclusion standpoint. That has driven Helicap to build infrastructure around measurement, not just narrative. The model deploys structured debt to fintechs, financial service providers, and non-bank lenders across Emerging Asia, who in turn reach MSMEs and underserved borrowers. Over 1,000 originator platforms screened since inception.
[05:40] Who Is in the Room: The Investor Landscape in Emerging Asia
Three patterns from investor conversations: mandate-embedded investors asking operational questions around verification and reporting; investors actively evaluating who want deal-level evidence; and yield-focused investors whose conversations are beginning to shift. BNP Paribas 2025 found 87% of 400+ institutional investors say their sustainability objectives remain unchanged, even amid significant political headwinds.
[10:06] More Than Climate: The Sustainability Case in Private Credit
In Emerging Asia, sustainability spans social and environmental dimensions simultaneously. The IFC 2025 MSME Finance Gap report estimates a USD 5.7 trillion financing gap globally, with East Asia and the Pacific holding the largest share. AIMA 2025 found ~90% of APAC private credit transactions involve borrowers without private equity backing. DFIs evaluate managers on lending criteria, originator screening, safeguards, and borrower-level impact tracking — a process conversation, not a values one.
[16:01] The Performance Case: Sustainability and Returns
The conversation has shifted — investors are no longer asking whether sustainability costs performance, but what opportunities they are missing by not engaging with it more deliberately. That reframing matters. A growing body of evidence challenges the assumption that sustainability and returns are in tension. Morgan Stanley H1 2025: sustainable funds posted median returns of 12.5% versus 9.2% for traditional funds. Full-year context: 5.3% versus 5.5% in H2. BCG and EDCI, drawing on 9,000+ portfolio companies, found sustainability work contributed a 4–7% improvement in realised EBITDA. FTSE Russell 2025: fiduciary duty as a motivation for sustainable investment moved from 14% to 42% in a single year.
*Disclaimer: Past performance does not indicate future results.
[20: 39] The Shift Toward Verified, Comparable Impact
Investors now ask how impact is measured at the outcome level, what verification looks like, and what happens when an originator falls short of ESG criteria. The EDCI covers 9,000+ portfolio companies across 300+ GPs, making cross-manager comparability more meaningful. FTSE Russell 2025 found 60% of asset owners cite disclosure differences as their top practical challenge. Two drivers of the shift: the data itself, and peer behaviour among institutional investors. A gap remains between front-end conversations in fundraising and the quality of ongoing reporting — investors are getting better at asking the right questions, but some managers are still catching up on providing consistent answers. GIIN 2024: data availability and quality remains the top challenge cited by impact investors globally — the front-end commitment exists, but the back-end infrastructure to evidence it is still being built.
[27:40] Sustainable Finance Across Public and Private Markets: The Reporting Gap
Themes are converging between public and private credit markets, but the structures are not yet aligned. Public markets have developed standardised reporting frameworks — the ICMA Green Bond Principles, adopted across 170 jurisdictions, give public markets a structural reporting lead that private credit does not yet have. Moody's forecasts USD 900 billion in global sustainable bond issuance for 2026. S&P Global projects USD 170–200 billion from Asia Pacific alone. The same themes driving that issuance — financial inclusion, energy transition, healthcare, education — are at the core of private credit deployment in this region.
[31:34] Where Do Investors Go From Here
The most useful starting point is to look at what you already own. Investors allocated to APAC private credit likely already have capital creating impact — it may simply not be labelled as such. The question is whether it is being measured and whether that measurement has integrity. Most investors in this space are not asking "how do I start?" but "how do I be more deliberate about something I am already doing?" Emerging Asia's structural conditions — a significant MSME financing gap, rapid fintech growth, and an expanding institutional investor base — make this a growing part of the capital allocation conversation. The structural demand is real, the capital is flowing. The gap is in making it visible.
[36:22] Q&A
The session closes with audience questions covering the biggest pitfalls in implementing ESG strategies in Emerging Asia's private credit market, how managers can balance closing the MSME financing gap against stricter ESG standards, and the most persistent misconceptions about sustainable finance in the region.
Director, Sales & Partnerships, Helicap Securities
Cheryl has over 15 years of experience in financial services across private wealth and institutional markets in Singapore. At Helicap, she leads sales and partnerships, working with accredited investors, family offices, and institutional investors across Helicap's private credit investment platform.
Prior to Helicap, Cheryl held client advisory and relationship management roles at Maybank Private Wealth, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, and Citi — building a career centred on understanding how investors allocate capital and how their priorities evolve over time.
Her work at Helicap sits at the intersection of investor relationships and product, giving her a close view of how institutional and private wealth investors are engaging with private credit in Emerging Asia — and how the questions they ask are changing.
Chief Sustainability Officer, Helicap Group
Meeta brings close to two decades of experience across financial markets, sustainable finance, and impact investing. At Helicap, she leads the firm's ESG integration, impact measurement and management frameworks, and sustainability-driven product development, with a thematic focus on financial inclusion across Emerging Asia.
Prior to Helicap, Meeta served as an ESG Transformation Specialist with the Asian Development Bank, where she developed sustainable finance policy for sovereign wealth funds in Central Asia and led ESG framework design for a Green Transition Private Equity Fund in Kazakhstan. She previously held senior roles at GreenArc Capital, a private credit impact investment firm, where she led the launch of social and sustainable bond products in collaboration with global development finance institutions and institutional investors. Earlier in her career, she held client relations and product specialist roles at Capital International, ACPI Investment, and CQS across Geneva, London, and Singapore.
Meeta is a Member of the Education and Content Committee at CFA Society Singapore, and co-authored the Oliver Wyman report, Driving ESG Investing in Asia: The Imperative for Growth. Her work sits at the intersection of commercial viability and development outcomes — embedding ESG and impact into financial products in a way that is credible to both institutional investors and development practitioners.
Thank you for tuning into the webinar. We hope the discussion offered useful insights into how sustainability, private credit, and financial inclusion are evolving across Emerging Asia. Join our mailing for more insights on private credit in Emerging Asia: Subscribe to Helicap newsletter
Please feel free to follow our speakers, Cheryl Tay and Meeta Misra, on LinkedIn for more perspectives on sustainable finance and impact investing in the region.
Disclaimer: This article is based on Helicap's webinar, Credit Where It's Due: Financing Impact in Emerging Asia. It is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, an offer, or a solicitation to invest.
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