Financing the Future: Key Takeaways for CFOs from the 2025 SDG Investment Forum

At the 2025 SDG Investment Forum, senior finance leaders and investors converged to address a defining challenge: how to mobilize the trillions required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in an era marked by geopolitical instability and widening inequality. For chief financial officers, the conversations reinforced a critical truth—finance leaders don't want to be confined by quarterly earnings cycles. They want to serve as architects of long-term capital flows whose decisions have the power to shape both corporate resilience and societal outcomes.

The Forum opened with a roundtable discussion on the UN Global Compact’s Sustainable Finance Roadmap, a blueprint for channeling investment into six critical transition areas: education, energy access, food systems, jobs and social protection, climate resilience and digital connectivity. While the ambition was welcomed, participants highlighted a stark financing gap. According to estimates from the United Nations, developing countries face a shortfall of over $4 trillion annually to meet the SDGs. Panellists noted that closing this gap will require finance leaders to work through partnerships that blend public, private, and philanthropic capital—using concessional finance to de-risk projects, building trusted relationships with development banks and aligning investments with long-term business value.

Blended finance, in particular, was described as one of the most promising mechanisms to unlock capital in emerging markets, yet one that is still underutilized. Despite global momentum, annual flows of corporate-led blended finance have plateaued around $15 billion over the past decade—tiny compared to the scale of need. Energy access exemplifies both the potential and the challenge. CFOs heard a clear message: companies must deepen their engagement with multilateral development banks and development finance institutions to de-risk projects, while governments and donors must accelerate project preparation and provide guarantees that make these investments bankable.

Across discussions, the KPI debate emerged as a critical bottleneck for capital. Investors underscored that unreliable, inconsistent sustainability metrics block underwriting and slow allocation, while CFOs pointed to duplicative, fragmented reporting that obscures what truly drives value. While the debate affirmed the importance of transparent reporting, it also stressed the need to avoid over-burdening companies; the direction of travel was toward fewer, decision-useful KPIs anchored in financial materiality and explicitly tied to enterprise-value drivers—growth, margins, efficiency, risk, and cost of capital—with independent assurance where feasible. Compliance indicators should be separated from those that influence pricing and capital allocation, and technology should be used to improve traceability and timeliness. For CFOs, the implication is practical and immediate: standardize and integrate assured, comparable KPIs into core planning and reporting so markets can recognize—and finance—long-term value creation.

The tension between short-term earnings pressures and long-term resilience was a recurring theme. Long-term investors such as pension funds and insurers—who collectively control assets worth over $60 trillion—operate with inherently long horizons, yet even they face quarterly reporting demands that pull them toward short-termism. For corporates, the pressure to deliver immediate earnings while transforming their business models is intense. Forum participants proposed concrete solutions: linking executive pay to sustainability KPIs, embedding quarterly sustainability reporting as a norm alongside financial reporting and using instruments such as sustainability-linked loans and green bonds to reduce the cost of capital. In Mexico, for example, Grupo Herdez has pioneered ESG-linked supply chain finance, demonstrating how CFOs can extend sustainability impacts across SMEs while generating tangible value-chain resilience.

The debate on standardized sustainability KPIs revealed deep frustration on both sides. CFOs argued that duplicative reporting demands consume resources, while investors emphasized that without standardization, capital cannot flow efficiently. The consensus was that fewer, financially material KPIs are needed—paired with sector- and geography-specific metrics where they are most decision-useful—because universal comparability matters less than alignment with enterprise value. As one speaker noted, “finance is the language of business, KPIs are the grammar, and different sectors speak different dialects.” The challenge is to translate sustainability outcomes into the drivers investors recognize—growth, profitability, efficiency and cost of capital—while tailoring the “grammar” to the realities of each industry and market.

Enabling ecosystems also emerged as a critical priority. Transactions cannot succeed in a vacuum; they require supportive policies, consistent governance, and standardized processes. Uruguay’s renewable energy financing vehicle was cited as a model: by combining concessional capital, clear governance criteria and tax incentives, it mobilized seven commercial banks and unlocked $30 million in transactions with just $5 million of concessional capital. The representative from a bank during this session emphasized that high transaction costs, regulatory fragmentation, and foreign exchange risk make blended finance deals slow and complex, but that solutions such as originate-to-distribute models and standardized playbooks  - shared templates for risk assessment, due diligence, legal documentation and stakeholder coordination - can accelerate pipelines by reducing negotiation time and creating repeatable structures across markets. These playbooks, often co-developed by multilateral banks and private lenders, act as “ready-to-deploy” blueprints that lower costs and speed up capital deployment without reinventing processes for each transaction. Investors stressed the importance of compelling impact narratives to make projects investable, while new technologies such as AI and data platforms are beginning to reduce due diligence costs and improve risk mapping.

The Forum’s closing session reframed gender equity as a growth driver rather than a social add-on. Research is clear that gender-diverse leadership teams outperform their peers, yet capital markets rarely treat gender equity as financially material. Discussion pointed to the value of embedding gender metrics in core disclosures—supported by independent assurance—where they are financially material. Examples such as KCB Group’s commitment to channel $2 billion to women-led businesses by 2026 illustrated how banks are using blended-finance partnerships to expand access to capital. Participants also noted that progress on retention and advancement often hinges on cultural shifts—flexible work, equal pay, and visible role models—as much as on new financial products.

Taken together, the sessions of the SDG Investment Forum underscored the expanding remit of the CFO. Finance leaders are expected to navigate beyond the quarter to the decade, to design financial strategies that make adaptation and resilience investable, and to embed inclusion as a pillar of sustainable growth. They must ensure that sustainability KPIs drive capital allocation rather than compliance fatigue, and that blended finance transitions from a niche tool to mainstream practice.

The implications are profound. CFOs who can integrate sustainability into the grammar of finance will unlock new sources of capital, reduce risk, and strengthen trust with investors. Those who cannot risk being left behind as capital markets increasingly reward companies that demonstrate resilience, transparency, and long-term value creation. The SDG Investment Forum made one thing abundantly clear: the future of finance will be written not in quarterly earnings reports, but in the long-term strategies CFOs design to build a sustainable and inclusive global economy.