About AFII

Offices 

Stockholm: Kornhamstorg 53 (Old Town)

London: 52 Jermyn Street

Launched in July, 2020, and seeded by the Growald Family Fund (GFF),  AFII is a non-profit think tank/research body to take a markets’ based approach to positive climate impact in fixed income markets. GFF, a part of the Rockefeller family, is a venture philanthropic donor focusing on climate change.

The picture of the green sprouts growing on the trading terminal encapsulates AFII’s basic philosophy: it’s through the buy and sell decisions by bond portfolio managers and traders out there that we could change cost-of-capital in favor of a sustainable future. It’s grimy, technical and quantitative, it’s an everyday struggle for alpha, but fixed income is extremely powerful when you direct it for a sustainable purpose: 

“I would like to be reborn as the bond market, because you can intimidate anybody” to quote political pundit James Carville.

The idea for AFII came from a number of lectures ‘Fixed income in the Anthropocene’ conducted over the course of 2019, and has been propelled into an independent organization by generous philanthropic seed funding. Earlier work, before the inception of the AFII, includes contributions to organisations such as GARP (Global Association of Risk Professionals) and the CFA Institute. AFII has a global market focus and currently runs offices in Stockholm and London, with consultants across the globe

Dr. Ulf Erlandsson is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of AFII. He comes from a background as a credit portfolio manager at the Fourth Swedish State Pension Fund (AP4) and as a quant strategist at Barclays Capital. He was one of the pioneers in the green bond market as well as in high-frequency credit derivative trading and has written extensively on credit trading, climate impact in fixed income and the combination thereof over the past 15 years.  Ulf earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Lund University.

Justine Leigh-Bell is Executive Director of AFII, having joined in Nov 2021.  She has over ten years of experience working with governments, investors and  industries on defining climate investment opportunities. Most recently,  she was the Deputy CEO of the Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI) where she  successfully led CBI’s market development strategy for green bonds in  emerging economies. Justine has a degree in molecular genomics from Yale Universtiy and an M.Sc. in Environmental Technology from Imperial College London.

The AFII team is building and currently has three front-office team members besides the executive group, as well as operational/backoffice staff to support the organisation.