Hans Peter Lankes: “The Bank has crept into my DNA"

 He left the EBRD for the IFC in 2016, to work as Vice President, Economics and Private Sector Development. His briefs have included economics, strategy, gender, blended finance, advisory, capital market development and climate business.

Hans Peter’s life has recently taken a more academic turn. He has joined the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a London-based think tank, as Managing Director and Deputy Chief Executive Officer. He also serves as a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics Grantham Institute (chaired by he former EBRD colleague, Nick Stern, now Lord Stern of Brentford).

“Having been at the EBRD in the pioneering days and then again experiencing it at maturity and in expansion, the Bank has crept into my DNA,” he says.

A focus on the private sector and private finance as powerful drivers of democracy and prosperity has been a consistent thread in Hans Peter’s career. He took the EBRD’s focus on impact – which he helped to develop in the 1990s and later reshaped into its current form – with him to the IFC.

While at the IFC, Hans Peter and his colleagues launched the Operating Principles for Impact Management as a way to link public and private impact investors and counter “impact washing”.

“These principles now have 180 signatories and half a trillion under management,” he says. “They’re pretty much a direct product of the approaches we developed at the EBRD two decades earlier.”

Since leaving the world of international financial institutions, Hans Peter has focused strongly on climate finance and the interplay between climate and development. He was a member of the G20 panel on MDB capital adequacy and of the Secretariat of the G20 Independent Expert Group on MDB reform.

“My experience at the EBRD and later at the IFC came in quite handy, of course, and interacting with former colleagues was crucial to the practical way we were able to frame the recommendations — which gave us considerable traction.”

Many of these themes and the connection with EBRD will remain central to Hans Peter’s new role at the ODI — which now counts half a dozen EBRD alumni among its governance and staff. Like the EBRD, the ODI has both a development and a “political” mandate, and its programmes range from finance to inclusion, development and climate, with fragility and geopolitics mixed in.

“I’m thrilled to be working quite closely again with colleagues at the Bank,” he says. “At some level, it’s a third homecoming.”

Read more about Hans Peter Lankes.