Robert van Zwieten
Robert van Zwieten has three and a half decades of prolific experience spanning global finance, emerging markets, sustainable infrastructure, international development, and governance. He was educated on two continents, lived on three, and worked on six, and maintains an extensive global network of the same reach. He has worked and lived in Asia for 15 years.
He is a Founding Partner of Route17, an independent advisory firm focused on working with asset owners, banks, and multilateral organizations on SDG finance, climate finance, natural capital, and blended finance. Over the past few years, he has provided expert advice to many multilateral development organizations, think tanks, private equity and venture capital firms, pension funds, asset management firms, corporations, and a global consultancy firm, specifically on climate finance, blended finance, natural capital, energy transition, sustainable infrastructure, fund development, and private sector capital mobilization. This has been distilled in some of Route17’s thought leadership online.
Robert also has a global portfolio of board and advisory roles, including as a Fellow with the Climate Policy Initiative, Ambassador of the World Benchmarking Alliance, board member of several companies and a bank, advisor to several investment funds in Asia and Africa, and advisor to an Asian family office. He is a Fellow at the Institute of Corporate Directors in the Philippines.
He is academically engaged as a Fellow at the Transition Investment Lab at New York University Stern School of Business Abu Dhabi, and as a Research Affiliate at SovereigNet at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, Boston, USA. He is a former Adjunct Professor in Finance at the Asian Institute of Management in Manila, Philippines. He has done research in and co-authored several academic articles on sovereign wealth funds and their sustainable investment track record.
Robert was the President and CEO of EMPEA (now renamed GPCA), the global industry association for private capital in emerging markets headquartered in Washington DC, representing an aggregate USD 5 trillion of AUM. He led the industry association's work to grow the asset class of emerging markets private capital into a formidable driver for investment returns and sustainable growth in these markets. Prior to this, he served as Director of the Private Sector Capital Markets Division at Asian Development Bank, where he led the bank’s work in developing financial markets in 42 developing member countries in Asia, and designed and incubated five new infrastructure investment vehicles and raised USD 800 million for these. This followed a global career of more than two decades in senior executive leadership positions in global financial markets in Europe, the United States and Asia. Amongst other roles, he was a senior banker in ABN AMRO Bank’s Investment Banking & Global Clients Division, Treasurer Asia-Pacific at GE Capital during the Asian Financial Crisis, Global Treasurer at GE Energy, Chief Administrative Officer at Lehman Brothers, Chief Financial Officer at Singapore Exchange, and Chief Operating Officer of an Asian hedge fund.
Robert holds his JD and MA degrees from Leiden University in the Netherlands, his LL.M. from Columbia University Law School, and his MBA from University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is a citizen of the United States and the Netherlands, and a long-term resident of the Philippines, where he and his family reside in Makati and Subic Bay. He is an avid motorcyclist, riding his motorcycles on Luzon backroads.
