Meet the ISSB

June 26, 2023 10:16 AM

The International Sustainability Standards Board built its 14-member board last year with a diverse set of people from around the world, with most members joining after the ISSB released the draft versions of its sustainability and climate disclosure standards.

The board members come from different backgrounds, including corporate leaders like ISSB chair Emmanuel Faber, who was previously chair and CEO of the French food giant Danone. Others are veteran standard-setters like vice-chair Sue Lloyd, a vice-chair of the International Accounting Standards Board, and former SASB Standards Board chair Jeffrey Hales and vice-chair Verity Chegar.

Others have been involved in international development, like the ISSB's other vice-chair, Jingdong Hua, a former vice president and treasurer of the World Bank. There are educators and academics, like Richard Barker, deputy dean and professor of accounting at Oxford University, and Tae-Young Paik, a professor of accounting at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea.

Below are brief profiles of the leaders and members of the ISSB. (For more on the board's current plans and its ambitions for the future, see our feature story.)

ISSB chair Emmanuel Faber

Faber is the former chair and CEO of French food and beverage company Danone (makers of brands like Dannon and Activia yogurt, Silk and International Delights creamers and milk substitutes, and Evian, Aqua and Volvic water, among others), where he worked for 20 years. He joined Danone in 1997 as CFO for strategy and served as CEO from 2014, as well as chairing the board from 2017 until 2021. Many have suggested that his departure from Danone was due to conflicts with Danone's board over his focus on sustainability issues; in any case, he left the company to become a partner at Astanor Ventures in October 2021 before joining the ISSB later that year.

Faber has lived and held senior leadership positions in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe, founding and chairing several international organizations and initiatives, including the One Planet Business for Biodiversity coalition and the G7 Business for Inclusive Growth coalition, co-chaired with the OECD's secretary general. He also started Danone Communities, a social business initiative providing funding to bring nutrition and water access for vulnerable communities, as well as the Livelihoods Venture, which provides funding for ecosystem restoration and the development of sustainable farming in emerging economies.

Before joining Danone, he was CFO and later managing director at Legris Industries. He also worked in investment banking at Baring Brothers and as a consultant at Bain & Co.

Vice-chair Jingdong Hua

ISSB vice-chair Jingdong Hua is the former vice president and treasurer of the World Bank whose responsibilities included green bond initiatives and sustainable finance capacity-building programmes. He was also administrator of the World Bank Group Pension Fund.

Before joining the World Bank, was vice president and treasurer of the International Finance Corporation, where he led innovative bond issuances in several emerging markets. He also previously served as deputy treasurer of the Asian Development Bank and has held positions at the United Nations Development Programme and the African Development Bank.

At the ISSB he is overseeing development and implementation of strategies to support and include stakeholders in emerging and developing economies along with small and midsized companies.

Vice-chair Sue Lloyd

ISSB vice-chair Sue Lloyd has been a member of the International Accounting Standards Board since 2014 and IASB vice-chair since 2016. She also served as chair of the IFRS Interpretations Committee starting in 2017. In addition to her IASB responsibilities, she played a leading role in establishing the ISSB from 2020, including as a member of the Technical Readiness Working Group, which was created by the trustees to give the ISSB a running start.

Prior to becoming an IASB member, she worked for the IFRS Foundation as a senior technical director, leading the development of new IFRS standards, and as director of capital markets with responsibility for the IASB's reform of accounting for financial instruments. She also worked for the IFRS Foundation from 2002 to 2004 as a technical project manager.

In her role as vice-chair at the ISSB, she oversees the overall organization of the ISSB's work and its technical staff, along with the connection between the ISSB and the IASB.

Richard Barker

Before joining the ISSB, Richard Barker served as deputy dean and professor of accounting at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford in the U.K. In this capacity, he led Oxford Saïd's sustainable business initiatives.

He has published a wide range of academic research papers on accounting and sustainability disclosures. He has chaired the expert panel of Accounting for Sustainability (A4S) and served as a member of several committees and bodies focused on corporate reporting in the U.K. and Europe, including the U.K.'s accounting standard-setter, the Corporate Reporting Council, as well as the Financial Reporting Advisory Board and the European Accounting Association's Accounting Standards Committee. He also served as a research fellow at the International Accounting Standards Board from 2001 to 2007.

Jenny Bofinger-Schuster

Jenny Bofinger-Schuster served as senior vice president for sustainability and operational excellence at German industrial manufacturing giant Siemens, where she was responsible for developing the company's sustainability strategy and for implementing new disclosure requirements. Prior to that she held senior positions at Siemens Management Consulting and Horváth & Partners Management Consultants.

Verity Chegar

Verity Chegar held various ESG investment leadership positions before becoming an ISSB member. Most recently, she led the California State Teachers' Retirement System's policy on sustainable investment and stewardship issues and managed the pension fund's work to reach its net-zero ambition.

Prior to that she worked at BlackRock, where she integrated ESG into the investment process across the firm's global portfolio management group of public and private investment teams, and advanced the consideration of material environmental and social issues for engagement and proxy voting teams. Before BlackRock, she was a sustainability research analyst at Allianz Global Investors, rating the sustainability performance and outlook of global technology and global health care companies for investment implications.

Chegar also has plenty of sustainability standard-setting expertise. She began participating in SASB's standard-setting process in 2014 as a member of the SASB Standards Council's Sub-Committee on Metrics. She went on to serve as an inaugural member of the SASB Standards Board from 2017 and as co-vice chair from 2018 to 2022. She also served as board liaison to the SASB Standards Investor Advisory Group.

Jeffrey Hales

Jeffrey Hales served as chair of Value Reporting Foundation's SASB Standards Board from 2018 to 2022, overseeing the agenda-setting and due process associated with the SASB standards development and maintenance. Before serving on the standards board, he chaired the SASB Standards Council, formed in 2012.

He also teaches at the University of Texas, where he is the Charles T. Zlatkovich Centennial Professor of Accounting. His widely published research has focused on reporting standards, regulation and behavioral finance.

He served as an academic research fellow at the Financial Accounting Standards Board in 2009-10 and as a member of its Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council from 2016 to 2019. Hales was also part of the U.K. Financial Reporting Council's Future of Corporate Reporting Advisory Group from 2018 to 2022. He was also a member of the Climate Disclosure Standard Board from 2018 to 2022.

Michael Jantzi

Michael Jantzi has 30 years of experience in responsible investment and sustainable finance. He joined the ISSB from Morningstar, where he worked as managing director of ESG strategy. He is the founder and former CEO of Sustainalytics, an ESG research and ratings firm that grew to global market prominence under his leadership and was acquired by Morningstar in 2020.

In 1992, he founded Jantzi Research and led a multiple-company merger that formed Sustainalytics in 2009.

He served on the board of directors of the Value Reporting Foundation and of the Principles for Responsible Investment. He also worked as a committee member of the Independent Review Committee on Standard Setting in Canada and as a board director of the MakeWay Foundation.

Hiroshi Komori

Hiroshi Komori worked as senior director and head of the stewardship of the ESG Division at the Government Pension Investment Fund in Japan from 2015 to 2022, where he established the division and developed GPIF's investor engagement and participation in international sustainability initiatives.

Prior to his work at GPIF, he worked for Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, where he created an investor relations consulting service for Japanese companies and Saitama Bank (now Resona Bank).

Bing Leng

Bing Leng joined the ISSB from the Chinese Ministry of Finance, where he was responsible for sustainability reporting initiatives. He initiated and led the implementation of several reporting-related programs, including the development of digital taxonomies to enable electronic reporting, the revised financial instrument accounting standards and plans focused on digitizing electronic payment vouchers and invoices.

He was a member of the IASB's IFRS Taxonomy Consultative Group from 2019 to 2022 and a member of the board of directors of XBRL International from 2014 to 2020.

Ndidi Nnoli-Edozien

Ndidi Nnoli-Edozien worked as the inaugural group chief sustainability and governance officer of Dangote Industries Ltd. — one of Africa's largest manufacturing businesses — from 2017 to 2020. In this role, she was responsible for developing the company's sustainability culture, strategy and reporting across 14 countries.

She has also served on several boards, committees and initiatives focused on corporate culture, impact investing, sustainability reporting and governance.

Tae-Young Paik

Tae-Young Paik has more than 30 years of experience as an academic and policy advisor on accounting and sustainability matters from Korea and internationally.

Before joining the ISSB, he served as professor of accounting at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul from 1995 to 2022. He worked as associate dean at SKKU from 2008 to 2009, as visiting professor at Baruch Colleague in New York, and as assistant professor of accounting at New York University's Stern School of Business from 1989 to 1994.

He chaired the Sustainability Evaluation and Disclosure Committee in the G7 Korea Impact Alliance, an organization created to support the G7 Impact Taskforce initiatives, from 2021.

He previously served on several committees focused on improving financial reporting in the Korean public sector and recently served as president of the Korea Accounting Association.

Veronika Pountcheva

Veronika Puntcheva served as senior vice president of corporate responsibility of Metro AG and co-CEO of NX Food, with responsibility for developing the company's long-term sustainability strategy. She previously held leadership roles at Metro in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Germany and Serbia. She also chaired initiatives at the Consumer Goods Forum and Leading Executives Advancing Diversity.

Elizabeth Seeger

Elizabeth Seeger has over 20 years of experience of standard-setting, investment and working on sustainability topics. She joined the ISSB from global investment firm KKR, where she served as managing director of sustainable investing, responsible for helping oversee the firm's consideration of sustainability matters throughout KKR's investment process and as part of KKR's Global Impact team. She also oversaw KKR's public sustainability reporting efforts, including the development of SASB and TCFD-aligned reporting.

Before joining KKR in 2009, she worked as a project manager in the corporate partnerships programme of the Environmental Defence Fund and a consultant with the Corporate Executive Board (now known as Gartner), where she advised companies from a broad range of industries in Europe and the United States. Before CEB, she was an associate at the Environmental Law Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on environmental law and policy research and education.

She served on the SASB Standards Board as an inaugural member, but began her standard-setting work when becoming a member of the SASB Standards Council in 2012.