Roopal Kanabar, Founder

Roopal Kanabar is the founder of Sustainabar, an independent strategic finance advisory firm she established in 2019 to bring the discipline and instruments of institutional finance to sustainable investment. Her conviction is straightforward: many of the greatest opportunities in development finance lie not in creating ever more pools of concessional capital, but in making the financial system coordinate the capital and liquidity that already exists.

That conviction now anchors her most ambitious work, Sustainabar FX Lab, which is piloting a mechanism to leverage diaspora remittances to create cost-effective FX hedges for investments in the Global South. If successful, the model could challenge the assumption that FX risk must remain an unavoidable and expensive feature of investing in these markets, and contribute towards a fairer and more efficient financing system that works for all.

Before founding Sustainabar, Roopal spent over a decade at Citibank in London and Sydney, holding senior roles across corporate credit risk, loan portfolio trading, and corporate derivatives sales and structuring. She has since advised a broad portfolio of clients working towards the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, among them FSD Africa, the Green Climate Fund, Acumen, the UN Climate Change High-Level Champions and the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. Her focus throughout has been the same, designing financial structures that connect institutional capital with measurable outcomes for people and the planet, and enabling private capital to flow at scale.

Roopal’s way of thinking, her understanding of cultural nuance and her intrinsic desire to serve have been shaped by her upbringing in Malawi. She divides her time between Blantyre, Malawi and London, United Kingdom and graduated from the University of Warwick with a First Class Honours degree in Computer and Management Sciences.