The Association of British Insurers (ABI) has said it wants to work with the UK Government to develop appropriate environmental investment opportunities and to respond to the Government’s Green Paper on Financing a Private Sector Recovery.

Speaking at the recent ABI Investment Conference in London, Alain Dromer the new chairman of the ABI’s Investment Committee considered that the key contribution institutional investors could make to the economic recovery was through an expanded role for the bond markets. However as the smallest size of bond issue to meet client requirements is between £100 million and £200 million, “if we are to fund green investment projects effectively, we therefore need to find a way of bundling them together, and of scaling up loans to emerging companies in high growth sectors, to make them attractive to the bond market. This may mean that, in some form, we reactivate the securitisation markets.”

Dromer argued that there were opportunities for the Government to work with the financial community in identifying the recent failures in the securitisation markets, rectify them and “re-launch the markets with a regulatory seal of approval, thereby tapping into a potentially rich seam of funding.”

For further information, visit: www.abi.org.uk