Episode 2: The current state of blended finance with Joan M. Larrea, CEO, Convergence

[Music] Hello everyone, welcome to the second episode of the blended finance broadcast brought to you by the blended finance company. At the blended finance company, our goal is to increase the flow of capital to the development sector. And we do that by pioneering blended finance programs that enable investors to deploy significant capital while generating sustainable returns and donors to maximize their catalytic leverage. A lot of heavy words there I realize and that is precisely why we decided to start this podcast to demystify blended finance and to understand what it can and cannot achieve. Through the spot cast, we bring to you some of the foremost thinkers and practitioners of blended finance globally. Who would be sharing their insights and experiences with us? I am your host, Neeraf Kambhurti, partner at the blended finance company. And today we have with us, Joan Lerere, CEO of Convergence, which is a global network for blended finance and one of the leading organizations dedicated to building the ecosystem of blended finance. Amongst other things, Convergence provides data and intelligence on blended finance deals and offers an online platform for investors and sponsors of transactions and funds to come together. Joan is an expert in catalyzing investment in places that need it most. She has over 30 years of experience in emerging markets, investing and has been the CEO of Convergence since its inception. She has previously worked in senior roles with the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation, now DFC, the Global Environment Fund and the IFC. Thank you for joining us, Joan. I am really thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation. Great. So to kick us off, Joan, I am sure our listeners would love to learn more about your background and what led to the setting up of Convergence. Starting with Telecom software aerospace, I have had a rather circuitous route leading me to the development finance sector. But it appears to me that stars were pretty much aligned in your case from the very beginning. Please tell us how we all played out. Well, I am glad it looks smooth from the outside. Real life is always a little bit messier. But my financial career got started at International Finance Corporation, where I was a classic investment officer that rose through the ranks. And there are many transactions out there where something other than classic even a development bank loan or equity is needed. And periodically, I would reach out for trust funds from various donors to get those ancillary things done that would make the transaction much more impactful. But we didn't have a name for it back then. I then went to into private equity and came out of that and went into DFC or what is now DFC. And my role there was actually partnerships. And again, that was blended finance by another name. What was happening was that transactions were going to DFC that were not quite bankable even for them as a development actor. And typically they had said, please go get yourself more equity or go get yourself something else. And then we will consider investing in your company. And the then head of OPEC, which is again now DFC said, this is kind of silly. We should be helping these people with very interesting transactions and companies and projects to find that other capital. And so I was brought on to try to strengthen the network of between us and providers of catalytic money, the foundations and the impact investors out there who could potentially step into a transaction and make it bankable for DFC. Again, there was no word for it. I was called one day by a head hunter to ask if I might consider running this new thing called convergence. And that is when the term blended finance came to me in my career. And it is essentially using catalytic money to draw in private investment where it otherwise wouldn't quite go. The risk and the rewards aren't calibrated right. And to get the deal to close and the money to flow to an important ambition in a developing country, be it health education, renewables, SME development, whatever it is. So my career always involved some kind of reaching out for catalytic money to make something more impactful or to make the deal close. And only belatedly did that kind of thinking acquire a label. And so I'm delighted that there's actually a company in India called the blended finance company and a podcast called that. And now for your audience's benefit, if you walk into any conference where they are talking about investing in difficult strategies and difficult geographies, you're going to hear this term. So I'm glad we're having this conversation. That is amazing, Joan and a lot of the credit for having the term popularized goes to converges that you there's something interesting I must share with you. You know convergence has actually played a very important role in getting me started in blended finance. I think this was in 2019. I was with kaisen west and Safiya Gulmani from your team, reached out and suggested that kaisen west considers participating in USAID's catalyze a jufan. At that point in time, we had not done anything like that and I suspect USAID was not expecting entities like kaisen west to participate, but we did. And eventually ended up getting selected as implementation partners for South African Rwanda. And that's how an email from convergence eventually led me to this exciting world of blended finance. And I'm pretty certain that over the years convergence has played a similar role for many other institutions and individuals. So my next question to you is going to be why blended finance convergence today synonymous with blended finance and like the blended finance company convergence has put all its eggs in the blended finance basket. But what is it about blended finance that excites you the most? First of all, I didn't know that story. That's really interesting and I'm glad to hear it and Safiya will be glad to hear it as well. She's still on board at convergence as our chief operating officer. Why blended finance honestly, it's pretty simple and let's demystify things. There's if you're looking at countries where investment capital doesn't regularly flow and sectors where investment capital is nervous about flowing. It's not going to just go because it's a nice thing to do. That's the role of development institutions. It's the role of overseas development aid. It's the role perhaps of Indian government entities. But guess what? All the governments of the world, whether they are host governments or whether they are overseas, you know, donor governments, they don't have enough money to accomplish the sustainable development goals. They just don't. So if investment capital isn't going into, you know, SDG related investments and if government money isn't enough, blended finance is a way to bridge those two pools of capital. So if you use donor money, philanthropic money, government money as a catalyst, as a de-risking device, as a return enhancement device, as a first in device, you can actually attract investment capital where it otherwise wouldn't go. So instead of the one kind of money operating by itself in a limited fashion in the development world and another kind of money operating on full commercial terms, but going nowhere near anything that hits the SDGs, there's a way to connect the two and get things done. So for me, it's just growing the pie, growing the pie of money, going at the things that you and I care about in economies that are not, you know, fully developed yet. Well, that actually leads me to this question, Joan. I often sense confusion amongst key stakeholders between various terms that are often used outcomes based financing or results based financing, blended finance, impact investing. And in India, because we've had outcomes based financing, lead the way for blended finance, I'm not sure that there is enough clarity around difference between what outcomes based funding or financing is and what blended finances. It would be fantastic to get your views on that. Sure. First of all, let's tackle the impact investing in blended finance distinction. Impact investors, as Kusie said in your first podcast, that's a state of mind when you go to invest that says, I not only want a return and maybe it's less than market return, maybe it's full commercial return. I not only will choose investments for that, but I also want investments that deliver an impact that I feel strongly about. That's an impact investor to philosophy of investing an impact investor may show up in a blended deal as the catalytic party, the party not operating on full market principles or may show up in a blended deal as the party being drawn in by the catalytic money. Maybe it's an impact investor wants purely hardcore commercial returns, but needs someone else to take a first-loss position or provide a grant. So an impact investor can show up in a blended finance deal. Most blended finance deals actually don't have impact investors in them, but just a bunch of impact investors doing a deal is not blended if they're all taking the same position and a deal. That investing is a style of investing. It's not a structuring device. Blended finance is a structure. Now, output-based aid is a very small percentage of the entire blended finance universe. So let's talk about what the whole universe looks like. There are about four or five really standard structures that you see over and over again. Now one of the things we've done is capture about 1,100 transactions that we've seen go by from press releases, from investors websites. We've gathered all that information. So when I say there are only four or five types, I'm speaking with authority from a pool of about 1,100 examples. The four or five things you see all the time are a blended finance deal where a party that's acting on non-commercial, non-fully market terms will go into the capital of a transaction. They maybe will take an equity position, but cap their upside to make sure everybody else has a better shot at earning a full return. Or they may be a debt provider that's subordinated, but not asking for a higher interest rate even though they're risk profile because they're second in line, even though they're risk profile is higher. They're in the capital of the fund or the project or the company in a non-commercial way, but they're in the permanent capital structure. That's a really classic way that you see blended finance happen. What you're going to do is output base date. It's just a concessional party saying, "I'm in it with everybody else, but I'm going to tweak the terms of my deal to enhance returns or reduce the risk of other people." A second really classic blended finance structure, which is really useful when you have a local capital market like India does, is guarantees. So a guarantee over, say, the debt in a deal, when the guarantee is not fully priced, when it is gently priced to try to make the whole economics of the deal work for everybody else, that is a blended finance structure. There are guarantors out there, and I actually have an example from the Indian context, national context site, if you'd like, in a moment. But a gently priced guarantee that makes a deal happen that takes risk off the table, classic blended finance. Another classic blended finance pattern is where there is a pool of technical assistance that a grantor provides, that accompanies a transaction. So you may have a fund, it may be blended or may not, but the fund manager is handed a pool of capital that's purely grant capital and told, "Look, it's an SME fund strategy. We're going to give you this grant capital so that as you work with SMEs, you can help female SMEs come to the fore, or you can help your SMEs get a better environmental profile. That's a technical assistance pool. And seeing those bolted onto transactions is pretty typical." And a fourth one I'll give you here is where the concessional party, the party that's catalyzing the rest of the money, is the first on the scene. So what we do at Convergence, for example, is design funding, which is we will give a grant out for a concept. It could be a fund, it could be a project, it could be a company. It doesn't exist yet. And we want the team to work on the idea to the point where they can attract commercial capital. So it's a one-two punch. First, a donor or a catalytic party steps forward and helps to bake the deal and then the rest of the money can come in on commercial terms. Output-based aid in the economies where Convergence focus is very, very small as compared to the rest of the field. The entire field operates at around $10 billion a year globally. And Output-based aid is, I mean, very, very small, probably less than a million a year. So billion with a B versus a million with an M. Output-based aid in our economies sometimes looks like a social impact bond or a development impact bond where investors will front the money, an implementing agency will carry out whatever activities it thinks should be carried out to achieve a development outcome. Once that development outcome is tested, a donor steps forward and pays the investor back plus interest. And the return is based on how well the development impact was done. Those transactions in the 10 plus years that we've been measuring this field, there are less than 15 of them. So impact investing is a style of investing, maybe blended, maybe not. There are some very classic structures in blended finance. And Output-based aid is a very small percentage of the field. Thank you, John. What I've taken away is essentially blended finance, either handles risk or return or does market building or sometimes there is first entity to take a leap of faith in a transaction and having those spot spints who do risk return market building being the first in the capital stack, create a blended finance transaction and Output-based funding is a small part of the overall blended finance market. That's fantastic. Thank you so much for that very clear explanation. My next question to you then is, by nature then, since it's a capital stack, we're bringing together very different kinds of stakeholders and each of these stakeholder groups perhaps have different motivations. So what is it that brings them together? I mean, have you seen examples where you saw different kinds of stakeholders who had aligned interest come together for blended finance transactions in a showcase manner, so to speak. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, that's the typical pattern with blended finances. There is some party that is trying to attract more money to a development goal and will act catalytically. And other parties enter who may or may not have any impact ambitions at all. Now there's a nice no joking convergence happening right now where purely financial investors more and more are asking questions about impact because they're managing money on behalf of eventually human beings who are asking questions and so that's trickling on through. But in your classic blended finance transaction, there may very well be a purely profit motivated investor. It could be, for example, a commercial bank. There's a transaction that happened, for example, in 2022, it was a $250 million deal with Somrid blended finance facility in India. And in that case, there were two archetypes came together there. We had commercial debt players. We had a concessional capital in the capital stack. And then there was a guarantee put on top of it. So the Somrid transaction was approaching the healthcare system of India and trying to get more healthcare enterprises some financing to work with. So there is a grant pool and a debt pool. And the grant pool was funded by USAID and Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation. And it de-risked commercial lenders into the debt pool. And then there was a guarantee, a concessional guarantee, another blended finance pattern from something called the 361 foundation, which brought in another $44 million from the National Skills Development Corporation. So overall, you had access bank, $150 million, purely commercial. You've got Ford Foundation, a Rockefeller Foundation, a USAID from the US who are totally philanthropic and HFDC and Indus Ind Bank as well. So there's a classic example of banks doing bank like things, but they're in the transaction and they're comfortable in the transaction because they know that there's a grant pool accompanying them and in one case a guarantee shaving some of the risk off for them. Classic example. So glad you brought this example of journalists. My favorite example in the edit context and so many of my friends were involved in this transaction. So I'm sure they'd be delighted to hear that you've taken note. And you mentioned about involvement of profit-motivated commercial capital. I would think that in some ways having that capital involved is almost a must because the whole purpose is to bring more commercial capital to development sector and that of course means profit-motivated capital. So if there are illustrations that demonstrate that it is possible for such capital to participate in development financing, then that is fantastic. So this is so impressive. your vantage point which perhaps is the best to one as far as the world of blended finances concern. Are you seeing more such examples getting created? My question is that what is the state of blended finance globally in terms of adoption across say countries, sectors as well as by philanthropic and commercial capital providers? Yeah so the most frequent sectors covered by blended finance are actually energy, typically renewable energy and financial services which often is you know for financial inclusion or for SME development. So there are patterns there as well. There are also patterns of entire industries or entire asset classes going from sort of public sector and philanthropy into blended finance world and then leaving blended finance world graduating from it into being fully commercial. We all know that microfinance example nobody thought that could be financed until Muhammad Yunus you know launched that industry and now microfinance is an asset class and there is microfinance strategies and funds that are purely commercial that there's no catalytic money needed, commercial money shows up and we'll take that bet. If you look at renewable energy it started off being very expensive and it started off being unknown and not understood by commercial parties and now it is a known asset class people know what to expect they know how it works they know what the technology risk is they know what the price points are and renewables in many economies also no longer need any kind of price support or risk cover to be commercially viable. Now there are still economies where as I said there's a lot of blended finance happening in the renewables space those are places where either they're not at scale or the country risk is still quite high but you see renewables you know becoming more and more commercial in more and more places so blended finance itself is sort of operating in a steady state but I am really excited when I see things moving beyond the need for it because that means that somebody's proved out the case you've built the off ramp and that particular sector or asset class has rolled off the off ramp and has gone on to other things. I don't know if that quite answered your question but that's what's on my mind when you ask it. No absolutely it does and the thought that comes to me is that the blended finance market when one looks at the total volume transacted even if it's at a steady state that's not necessarily bad news right because then blended finance is establishing the viability of market based mechanisms to come in and take over and then that same conceptual capital can move on to other uses to prove market viability there so those are absolutely thanks that was very well explained. At the blended finance company we are very happy to actually adopt blended finance structures that have worked elsewhere and then in the interest of scale just replicate them with maybe some customization between coming up with new and innovative structures and focusing on scale where do you see the larger need to be in blended finance? Are there any examples of scaled up blended finance structures that you'd like to share? Yeah I believe both are important the innovation and the big boring and repetitive end of the field and I'm by the way very excited about the big boring and repetitive end of the field and I've described for just a moment ago that conveyor belt that I hope we can establish of other industries, microfinance renewables, marching certain things through a process by which they first are untested then they get tested blended finance and then they graduate. So in these sort of the big and repetitive and established part of blended finance things that hopefully are on their way off the end of the conveyor belt you have renewables, you have financial markets transactions, agribusiness transactions, climate smart agriculture and huge segment of transactions happening in the climate space either it's mitigation or much less so but it's a growing area adaptation finance. So where innovation is needed where I am excited about innovation isn't just for the sake of coming up with new and fancy things it's where the field is untested. How do you do nature-based finance? How do you come up with transactions where you can synthesize a revenue line out of preserving mother nature? How do you come up with transactions where you can put together different revenue lines from a marine protected area to come up with an investable thesis at the scale that is needed? How do you you know all of that climate finance that has to do with adaptation and conservation? It will be investable one day when we figure these some of these things out and we form a pattern but we need to innovate and test some patterns before we get there. You know we we have carbon credits there's a lot of talk now about other kinds of credits, nature credits, forest credits. That kind of innovation is going to take catalytic parties taking a bet. You know perhaps underpinning the price of a forest credit in a transaction so that if there is eventually no market that's formed somebody else knows that they have a place that they can get a minimum price for what they put their money in. I'm just rifting here but you see what I'm saying there's there's a place for for absolute standardization don't reinvent things. If you know how to do them do them at scale do them well and do them repetitively and then there is also space where we don't know how to do this stuff yet it's not at scale we need to tinker a bit but both are important but I don't want to see continued innovation where it's not needed. If for example there's an existing institution that knows how to give concessional guarantees to early stage infrastructure in risky countries and they do it really well. I hope any donor on this call thinks let me double down and put another check in that machine and not come up with some new innovative way to figure this out we figured it out it's sitting there let's let's give it more money so innovation matters but doubling down on things that already are proven is also important. Fantastic. Then talking about innovation and tinkering the design grants program that you run seems to be a very interesting experiment in fact two organizations that I'm associated with Wartuna in India and Global Schools Forum in the UK have received design grants in the past. Could you share what the objectives of offering these design grants are and what has been the overall experience and what have been the learnings so far? Sure so our design funding program provides grants on a competitive basis toward particular problems that we and our funders have decided we'd like to try to tackle. All in we've probably put about it's a very small amount of money out the doors it's probably I don't know 10 12 million with an M million dollars in grants across say 40 transactions so these are small grants the point of these is not to invest in a fully formed fully baked transaction the point is to provide budgetary support for a team that has an idea that we think would be bankable if it were able to go to the capital markets but for some reason the team doesn't have the bandwidth or nobody wants to take the risk to put the money in so the point of design funding is to catch that early stage transaction that would otherwise die before it ever hit the market and the broader point is to increase the pipeline of investible blended finance transactions you will hear all the time from fund managers who investors that even if they are willing to take a chance on a transaction in an emerging market they can't see the pipeline they can't find the deal so this is our attempt to push more transactions out there into the market obviously our small attempt does not itself build out a pipeline so we are trying to pick transactions that are exemplary they prove a point they open up a market they demonstrate investibility of something that is quite unproven so this is all in that innovation space it is venture style philanthropy probably about a third of the things we've backed have not gone anywhere in the end about a third are still underway and about a third have hit the markets the interesting thing about the ones that have hit the markets is all in they have raised so the work is on the teams that we funded we didn't do this but their work has gone on to raise permanent capital of you know close to two billion dollars that's billion with a B so you're talking just a few million dollars out the door at the early stages that helps to get something rolling that in aggregate can move billions of dollars so the point of it again is to pick early stage Get things to market, prove out a point, and then provide something investible for people to pick up behind us. There is not enough of this happening in the market. We see donors and funders jumping into the investment stage, but not the pre-investment stage. And at the pre-investment stage, what you hear is project preparation funds. Those are more for projects, right? You're trying to build out a wind power site. You need somebody to help you pay for testing the wind and figuring out what the tariff levels are in a particular country and what the regulatory regime is. That's not what we're doing. We're looking for financial constructs that could be helpful to crack a development problem. Well, two million with a B mobilized at an investment of a few million. Those are statistics that any venture funder or accelerator would be very proud of. And while our focus is right now on scale, I do hope that someday the blended finance company can also participate in and benefit from the design grants program. I want to turn you up in. There's a lot of interest in it. I should just, sorry, interrupt you. I just wanted to say we have several windows open now. We have one that is a joint venture with Climate Policy Initiative called the Catalytic Climate Finance Facility that we have an ambition to grow to $100 million. It's right now at about $13 million and it's open. We have another one in Asia, the Asia Climate Solutions window, which is focused, as you can tell from the name, specifically on Asia and on a couple of themes. And we are helping a collection of Swiss entities with their granting program where we are helping to run it, but they are the ones writing the checks and owning the grant contracts. And that one is called SIFI, the Sustainable Investment Finance Initiative, I believe is the name of it. So there are opportunities out there right now and they are covered on our website in case anybody is listening wants to go look. And we run webinars to try to explain what we're looking for. So there's a lot of resources on our website that would be helpful. Thanks, Jordan. I'm sure this is very valuable information for our listeners. I want to turn your attention not to India. As you know, there's a lot going on in the country at the moment. And in many ways, India is at this perfect intersection of this very large need for blended finance and also a reasonably high level of investor interest. As the blended finance company, the sheer number of super interesting conversations that we are involved in just within the first three months of starting up is absolutely phenomenal. Touchwood. What are convergence plans for India? How are you looking at the market? Well, first of all, India is a favorite destination for blended finance investments. So it's an incredibly important neighborhood for us. And South Asia in general is one of the fastest growing regions in the world. And obviously blended finance is following that pattern. So India is important for us. And it's such a large place that starting from zero is difficult. And we are still a modestly sized and Canada headquartered company. So we need to serve the Indian market. We need to bring the methodology of blended finance and the experience set from other countries to India. And we also need to bring the Indian experience and share it with everybody else. But how do you do that as a small firm based in a different place? We very much are going to be looking for partnerships to cover India. We can't cover it weekly from abroad forever. We need to cover it authoritatively, but that's going to take partnerships. And I say partnerships not only because of the size of the challenge, but because of the depth of the financial community in India, this is a place where there are people on the ground who already know so much more than we will ever know. And I count you among them. So when we approach India, we're going to be doing it in tandem with other parties. I also think that the Indian experience is going to be teaching us some new things. I'm aware tangentially of India's attempts to galvanize the philanthropic community and the CSR wings of corporations. And I think that is a really interesting part of this story that could be developed in this particular country. You know, Joan, I've had the benefit of browsing through some of the transactions that are listed on your website. While I thank you for your interest in appreciation of what's going on in India, I genuinely believe that there's a lot that we in India can learn from what's going on outside. So we would love to have a strong convergence presence in the country. And if there's any way that the blended finance company can help you establish a stronger presence, it will be delighted. You know, in one of your other podcasts, you were asked, what are the barriers to scaling blended finance? And you had said, and I caught, there are not that many parties are there putting together transactions who know how to appeal to the impact purchasing behavior of a donor and the returns purchasing behavior of a commercial investor. Well, as you know, we have taken the plunge of the blended finance company and began creating such an entity. And I'm sure that there are many more such entities required. So we of course would love to be your partner, but that also brings me to my question that having created this entity and hopefully we'll have many more such entities around the world, what are the other factors that are needed to make the billions to trillions transition happen for blended finance? Well, first of all, thank you for your interest in all of this. The lack of intermediaries is an issue. Very much is. As I said, there are people who know how to pitch to commercial entities and there are people not to pitch to donors and putting a structure together that appeals to each and will get to the finish line. It's pretty, that's a, you know, not yet a developed skill. So sorry, the rest of your question was what else is needed to hit scale? Is that correct? That is right. Yeah. There is a finite supply of official donor aid out there from the likes of the British and the United States and the Dutch and the Swiss. There's a really finite, you know, Australians, wherever. There's a very finite amount of that aid and there are other things pulling aid money in other directions, refugee crises and wars and so that money is not likely to grow and it's hotly competed for. So aiming it at blended finance is tough. Usually it's only, you know, a very, very small fraction of all official development aid that goes into blended finance. So that pot is not growing. Philanthropies are only about 10% of the, are only in about 10% of the transactions we've ever seen. So Philanthropy is interesting in terms of catalytic money but they aren't yet activated to do transactions in emerging markets to, you know, create opportunities for commercial investors. So that's a more of a latent possibility than a present possibility. So those are really the two sources of catalytic money and their, they form a limitation on the field. So we have to figure out how to use that money better. That means one dollar of that kind of money not going to attract one dollar of commercial money but four dollars, eight dollars, ten dollars, twenty dollars of commercial money. So we have to figure out how to use it better and we have to figure out how to telegraph better where that money is interested in playing. It's very hard right now. If you go into say a USAID web, I'm not picking a USAID, they're the biggest donor out there. But if you go into their website, it's not that easy to navigate to figure out, okay, I'm a commercial company. I have a problem that needs some grant money. It's got powerful impact. Now what do I do? That's not an easy question to answer on the website of any donor. So we have to get better at using official development assistance and Philanthropic money. And that takes an educational process. You know, maybe an advocacy process. It's not really convergence is strength but somebody else out there can be working on that and we can help with the storyline. We also need commercial investors to have better latitude. So right now, you know, commercial banks, insurance companies, pension funds, they have a lot of regulations on what they're allowed to do. They're not even allowed to go into in many times countries that lack a credit rating. So India is ahead of the game here. You at least have a sovereign credit rating. So that will allow more of those parties a chance to come in with some blending into strategies that they might not be able to take on in another country. But that's a big problem as well is how do you create transactions that those large, regulated, fully commercial asset managers and asset owners can take on? they can't change their mandate. I mean, you don't want your pension money suddenly going in into very high risk things, nor do you want your insurance payout to be subject to very illiquid investments. So how do we get that money to the table in quantity through a better use of ODA and philanthropic money? The bottom line is, how do we get that math to work out better? This has been such a stimulating conversation, John. But I think I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you that having achieved so much, what's next for you, what's next for conversions? You're very kind. We have a lot of work to do. We want to be bringing out better the country voice in this conversation. If you pay attention to anything blended finance, which our audience probably doesn't do every day, but you will pick up a pattern that is the donor nation's talking, it is the foreign investors talking. In the case of India, I would love to see Indian philanthropies and Indian development institutions and economic institutions and Indian commercial banks and Indian investors having this conversation. So again, we're small. We're going to pick a couple of places, but we hope that we help drive the conversation from a country perspective about blended finance better than it has ever happened before. That's big on our set of issues. We're pushing hard into Asia, as you know, we now have a Singapore office as of about a year back and we're growing that out. As I said before, I don't know long term that we can handle India from any place other than India. So that's also a next step. We're going to be pushing hard on climate and mitigation and adaptation finance because of the huge overlap between climate finance and blended finance. Our state of blended finance edition from October of last year is all about climate. And it is that for a reason because that is one place where commercial investors scaled commercial investors are interested in playing. And so if the donor crowd can figure out how to get their money into that game, we will have made significant progress in the use of blended finance toward development. So that's big for us. Those are just a few things I will put down in answer to your question. Thank you, George. It was absolutely wonderful having you with us today. And I sincerely look forward to partnering with you and convergence for India in the days to come. It's been a delight having this conversation. Thank you so much, Neurov. And I really look forward to seeing what you do in the future. Thank you, listeners for joining us. Please let us know your thoughts and also the topics that you would like to see covered in future episodes. You'll find details in the podcast description on how to get in touch with us. Meanwhile, we'll be back again next month with yet another stalwart of blended finance. Till then, here's me Neurov and the team at the blended finance company signing off.