What if financiers started thinking like finance ministers? In this episode of Women Changing Finance, Megumi Muto, Senior Managing Executive Officer and Deputy Group Chief Sustainability Officer at Mizuho Financial Group describes what it means to integrate impact into one of Japan’s largest financial institutions. Megumi brings a rare dual perspective: decades in development finance, including at JICA, and now as a sustainability executive inside a large bank, financing industrial transformation. From hydrogen and carbon credits to adaptation finance and blended finance, Megumi explains how Mizuho is working to transform industries like energy, steel, chemicals, and automotive, and make them more sustainable. She shares how Mizuho is embedding impact across $14 billion in assets, and we explore:

• What  “transition finance” looks like in practice
• Why impact-related decisions must take future impacts into account
• Why public and private actors must collaborate from the very beginning
• How Japan leads regional efforts on adaptation and transition finance across Asia.

This episode is about bridging worlds: public and private, short-term and long-term, profit and purpose.

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You can also

• Visit our website: womenchangingfinance.org
• Read Megumi's full bio

To go further, here are some of the references mentioned during the episode:

• Mizuho Financial Group — https://www.mizuhogroup.com
• Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) — https://www.jica.go.jp
• Impact Driven Finance Initiative (IDFI) — https://idfi.jp
• Development Bank of Japan (DBJ) — https://www.dbj.jp
• Asia Capital Markets Forum (ACMF) — https://www.theacmf.org
• ASEAN Taxonomy for Sustainable Finance — https://www.theacmf.org/sustainable-finance/publications/asean-taxonomy-for-sustainable-finance-version-4
• Asia Transition Finance Study Group — http://atfsg.org/
• Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction — https://www.undrr.org/implementing-sendai-framework/what-sendai-framework
• GSG Impact Japan - https://impactinvestment.jp