E191 Nadia Nikolova

Impact investing has spent years fighting for a tiny slice of institutional portfolios. Nadia Nikolova thinks that is the wrong fight.

As CEO of ResponsAbility, managing almost $6 billion across emerging markets, Nadia sits at the intersection of institutional capital, climate, sustainable food and financial inclusion. She explains why impact investments should compete for the same 95% of portfolios as everything else, and why the industry needs better data, ratings, scale and replicability to get there.

But the conversation goes much further. From growing up during Bulgaria’s hyperinflation to watching capital transform nations, from blended finance and the $150m pension fund investment that marked a major milestone for ResponsAbility, to AI potentially creating a “missing generation” of workers and robotics threatening the labour-cost advantage of emerging markets. The question running through it all: what happens when capital starts pricing the future properly?