Sustainable Fitch’s global head of analytics and product development Gianluca Spinetti reflects on the market dynamics driving the firm’s expansion into second-party opinions and transition finance.
Environmental Finance: How has Sustainable Fitch’s strategy evolved since it was launched in 2021?
Gianluca Spinetti: Sustainable Fitch aims to be a leading data and insight provider at the intersection between fixed-income investing, sustainability, and impact. Strongly anchored in Fitch Group’s heritage in fixed income, we also integrate a focus on sustainability by considering impact materiality across all our offerings. For example, when we analyse companies, we assess their impact on both the environment and the society in which they operate.
Since our inception in 2021, when we made a decision to grow organically, our market share has risen steadily each year. Today, Sustainable Fitch counts approximately 125 employees, spread out across the world. About one hundred of our employees are analytical, which represents a significant growth compared to the 20-analyst-strong team that debuted in 2021.
We provide a number of analytical products, including sustainability ratings, second-party opinions (SPO), European green bond external reviews, transition assessments, and all the underlying data underpinning our assessments. The growth in the products offered to the market has been organic too, without acquisitions. We frequently engage with stakeholders to stay on top of market needs and improve the quality of our products.
EF: How has your SPO offering evolved in line with wider market trends?
GS: We started with our SPO offering about four years ago. Today, we provide SPOs globally across a variety of sectors, from corporates to financial institutions, from structured and project finance to sovereign, supranational, and agency (SSA), from developed markets to emerging markets.
Last year, we added the European green bond external review offering. In that space, we have been able to provide the review for the first-ever EU Green Bond (EuGB) and for the first – and only – sovereign, too.
We created a very granular and publicly available methodology that incorporates market standards and best practices. We also took feedback into account to improve the delivery and clarity of our opinions. Our product development, supported by the recognised analytical expertise, allowed us to become a trusted and reliable partner. We had around one per cent of market share in 2022 and managed to reach 13.34 per cent for SPOs and 34.48 per cent for EuGBs as of end of 2025, according to Environmental Finance Data.
EF: How do the SPOs relate to your ratings?
GS: The sustainability ratings/scores and transition assessments come on top of the SPOs. Our objective is to be a one-stop shop for issuers and counterparties, meaning we can provide an SPO before the transaction is launched, and then ratings on the transactions and entities. For some hard-to-abate sectors, we can also provide transition assessments, focusing on commitments, achievements, and implementation.
EF: A key challenge in transition finance is the importance of both regional and sectoral pathways. How do you take into account local contexts for your transition assessments?
GS: One of our strengths here is the ability to provide analyses that have contextualisation and localisation considerations. The regionalisation of our teams benefits us in that regard. Being spread around the world, we can better monitor local pathways, regulations, and taxonomies. That was always the plan: to have an analytical team closer to where the activity is happening, helping us to contextualise sustainability performance and provide valuable and regionally relevant insights
EF: What will be your focus for 2026?
GS: In addition to traditional SPOs and EuGBs, this year our focus will be on transition finance on one side, while consolidating our presence on our other products and continuing innovating with new analytically relevant data products.
With regards to transition finance, leveraging on the principles and guidance released towards the end of last year, we will focus on entities that want to issue loans and bonds that can be tagged or labelled as ‘transition’ or ‘climate transition’. That’s where we would expect growth in 2026. So, we will be looking to ramp up our efforts to provide guidance there.
We believe that being local will allow us to better understand and be able to capture the specifics of transition. As a matter of fact, we have updated our methodology to incorporate Transition Finance guidance, created an internal cross-sector and cross-region working group to increase specialistic knowledge and be able to cater for any type of activity, entity and the related interplay.
Before the recent guidance from the International Capital Market Association and the loan associations, we did a few transition analyses on dedicated frameworks and transitional UoPs in transportation, power, energy and materials sectors. That said, while in 2026 we still have not seen the volume take-up expected in the market, we are having quite a few conversations, transition-specific, especially in emerging markets, or with financial institutions for their lending books.
For more information, see: www.sustainablefitch.com