Latin America’s four largest stock exchanges gathered in Colombia for the first Sustainable Stock Exchanges (SSE) Regional Dialogue: LatAm & Caribbean.  The regional version of the flagship SSE Global Dialogue was facilitated by the SSE, hosted by the Colombian Securities Exchange (BVC), and sponsored by the Latin American Sustainable Investment Forum (LatinSIF).

Officials from B3 (Brazil), the Mexican Stock Exchange (BVM) and the Santiago Stock Exchange (BCS) joined the BVC in devising strategies to leverage key external partners as well as each other in advancing their own commitments to actions to promote corporate sustainability in their markets.  A rich exchange of ideas, best practices, and challenges to overcome resulted.

The conversation quickly centered on developments on the transparency front, an area that has seemingly been moving at warp speed with ever-increasing demands from every corner of the capital markets.  As a result, all four exchanges are working on that as the main priority this year and into the future.

Importantly, the half-day encounter led to a meeting of the minds around collective action to mobilize investors in these emerging markets via training and awareness-raising to augment their consumption of ESG information provided by companies, and its integration into investment decision-making.  The goal is to stimulate demand for this information that companies are already supplying to the market.  Several external partners will likely support this approach by SSE Partner Exchanges.

The SSE aims to make the Regional Dialogue a regular occurrence in Latin American and the Caribbean.  On 18 May, the SSE will hold its next Regional Dialogue in Southeast Asia, hosted by the Stock Exchange of Thailand in Bangkok.

Six stock exchanges in Latin America and the Caribbean are Partner Exchanges of the SSE, including all four exchanges in the Integrated Latin American Market (known as MILA for its Spanish initials) – Santiago, Lima, Colombia and Mexico . The aim of the SSE, launched by the UN Secretary-General in 2009, is to promote the collaboration of stock exchanges with investors, regulators and companies in order to enhance corporate transparency, and ultimately performance, on environmental, social and corporate governance issues and to encourage sustainable investment.