EEMI International Sustainable Housing Finance Symposium

On 4 October 2022 the EEMI brought together key representatives of the EEM Label, its Advisory Council, the ISMMA and a range of other key market stakeholders to facilitate an exchange of views and ideas focused on improving and coordinating market actions, ESG policies and regulation, and best practices in support of the design and deployment of a new energy efficient mortgage market value chain. This helped ensure that the mortgage credit sector is able to realise its full potential in supporting the drive to the transition economy whilst securing social inclusion.

Please find here the agenda

The powerpoint presentations displayed displayed during the Symposium Meeting are available below:

• Insights from the OECD Housing Policy Toolkit by Luiz de Mello, OECD
• Doing well by doing good the investment story of the 21st century by Danae Kyriakopoulou,Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science
• ISMMA Meeting October 4 2022: Introduction by Simon Walley, The World Bank Group
• Japanese Perspective: Promotion of green houses through Flat35S by Japan Housing Finance Agency (JHF), by Masahiro Kobayashi, Japan Housing Finance Agency
• Financing for energy efficiency – Fit for 55, EU Renovation Wave and REPowerEU by Carlos Sanchez Rivero, DG Energy, European Commission
• EUTaxonomy Hotspot by Catia Alves, Moderator of the ECBC ESG Bond Task Force & Piet Hein Schram, Dutch EEMI Hub Coordinator

The emerging energy crisis is calling for rapid and coordinated market and policy actions to reduce the EU’s external energy dependence. In this context, improving the energy performance of the EU’s building stock, which is responsible for 40% of the EU’s energy consumption and 36% of greenhouse gas emissions, is an absolute priority. The scale of investment needed to improve the energy performance of more than 220 million residential dwellings to achieve the EU’s energy savings targets is huge and cannot be met by the public sector alone. The EU private financial sector will therefore play a central role in the transition to a more sustainable economy, reducing energy poverty for households, safeguarding consumer wealth in terms of disposable income and asset value, supporting economic growth and job creation, and, helping to support the REPowerEU initiative to secure the EU’s energy independence.

Since 2015, the EEMI has sought to mobilise the EU’s mortgage and covered bond industries in support of these objectives. At the heart of the EEMI are efforts to deliver an energy efficient mortgage “ecosystem”, which will boost consumer demand for building energy renovation. Bringing together a wide range of relevant market players, including lenders, investors, SMEs and utilities, the EEMI is aligning strategies and actions through a new, innovative market mechanism focussed on a green fulcrum of products, services and data, delivered by way of a “one-stop-shop”. With the overall objectives of optimising the end-to-end customer journey and experience, deploying market interventions and partnerships that support delivery and therefore maximising benefits for consumers, the EEMI is concretely building an open-source platform at the centre of the “ecosystem”, which will:

• Provide access to and guide consumers towards the most efficient and cost effective, integrated technical and financial products, services and advice, whilst ensuring commercial neutrality and offering a European approach to delivering market-specific actions.
• Deliver a continuous flow of ESG data for lending institutions, investors and SMEs on building energy performance (improved EPCs, primary energy demand), EU Taxonomy alignment and ESG counterparty assessment and ratings.
• Favour the implementation of market best practices to secure gradual but continuous market transition and alignment with EU legislative requirements.

The EEMI will build a constellation of national platforms focussed on local characteristics and implementation needs but with a European footprint. The EEMI governance structure, combining the European-level EEM Label and Advisory Council with the EEMI national hubs, will provide the European coordination of national actions, including institutional interventions, which will support timely and cost optimised coordination between and amongst the public and private market sectors. By way of this structure, the EEMI will also propose macroprudential measures to support, through legislation, consumer demand, lending institutions’ ESG financing capabilities and investor ESG due diligence, as private capital cornerstones of the Renovation Wave Strategy and NextGenerationEU.

In addition to the work in this area in Europe of the EEML, the EEMI and the EMF-ECBC, this event is being organised in collaboration with the International Secondary Mortgage Markets Association (ISMMA), which brings together major actors in areas of ESG finance, housing policy and mortgage refinancing at a global level.

For further information, please write to info@hypo.org.