Hiro Tsubota

Hiro has over 32 years of investment and advisory experience, including 24 years at the World Bank and eight years in investment banking in Europe and Japan. Expert in banking, structured finance, derivatives, and debt management, with a portfolio of projects, spread globally in Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Prior to joining Clima Capital Partners, he managed a broad range of financial sector development and public finance management projects. He was a lead expert on capital market development, and managed and contributed to developing diagnostic frameworks, such as the G20 Local Currency Bond Market Diagnostic Framework (2013). He also played a corporate role in numerous initiatives at the World Bank on financial innovations, including climate finance products such as green bonds.

In the sustainable finance area, he played a key corporate role at the World Bank to establish a framework for finance for development, focusing on how debt finance can be deployed in a sustainable manner as well as how scarce public sector resources could be best deployed and help leverage private-sector investments. He also led the preparation of internal background papers to determine the Bank’s position on climate finance instruments, such as green bonds, sustainability bonds, debt-for-nature swaps, and various forms of guarantees. At the country level, he advised governments on the deployment of these instruments. Since joining Clima Capital Partners earlier at the beginning of this year, he also provided technical leadership and quality assurance in completing the FSD Africa project on Green Bonds in the SADC Region, NDC-related work, and led multiple engagements in green banking in middle-income countries.

Prior to joining the World Bank, Hiro was an investment banker advising governments, including subnational governments in Germany and Japan on bond issuance and financial risk management.

He holds an MBA from INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France, graduated in economics from Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan, and studied economics at the University of Economics, Vienna, Austria. He is fluent in English, German, and Japanese, and has a working knowledge of French.