(Bloomberg) — Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., met with leaders of the World Bank Group and several other multilateral development lenders as they seek to attract more private money to initiatives on Emerging Markets.
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Dimon and leaders, including U.S. International Development Finance Corporation Director Scott Nathan, discussed how to redirect private capital to countries or issues often overlooked by investors and the need to invest in more quality projects focused on development.
They met Thursday at a closed-door lunch hosted by JPMorgan on the sidelines of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington.
The World Bank and other development lenders are struggling to remain relevant because their capabilities are far outstripped by the needs of poorer countries, particularly for capital-intensive climate projects.
They therefore called on the private sector to invest more and governments to mobilize more capital, with both approaches having yielded poor results so far.
The push also comes as the United States and its partners seek to offer an alternative to development finance from China, now the largest official creditor in emerging markets.
Read more: Biden’s push for World Bank funds to compete with China stalls
Topics discussed by Dimon and lenders included risk sharing and increased access to private debt markets through bond issuance, options offered by development banks to help support emerging economies around the world .
Rémy Rioux, director of the French Development Agency, said the meeting was the result of years of work aimed at attracting private investment, adding that it was the first time he could recall that a leader of bank also in view that Dimon was attending such a meeting during this meeting. the last two decades.
“It was our first time with Jamie Dimon,” Rioux said in an interview. “He was curious and trying to understand” each bank and its goals, he said.
Dimon has placed JPMorgan at the heart of the financial world’s responses to some of the most pressing recent geopolitical issues. In January, he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Davos, aiming to build support for the war against Russia and his country’s reconstruction plans.
JPMorgan counts development banks and multinational institutions – including the IMF and the World Bank – among its most influential clients. In 2020, it launched a development finance institution, billed as a way to expand private financing of sustainable development deals in emerging markets.
JPMorgan declined to comment.
“People are starting to see this broad architecture of public financial institutions,” Rioux said, adding that he has also spoken with Citigroup Inc. and other Wall Street institutions. “We are prepared to welcome and respond to this kind of interest.”
Rioux also chairs the Common Finance Summit, a gathering of more than 500 multilateral, national and subnational institutions with $23 trillion in assets. The group is seeking deeper coordination and integration at a summit later this year, to be hosted by the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
The World Bank said in a statement Sunday that Hiroshi Matano, head of its multilateral investment guarantee agency, and Makhtar Diop, managing director of its International Finance Corporation arm, which lends to the private sector, were present at the meeting. He said the meeting provided an opportunity to address key trends in the global economy, as well as areas of collaboration between the development finance community and the private sector.
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