Wilfried Bolt

A little background
Wilfried studied economics in Maastricht and started his career at DSM in Heerlen. ‘I started as a trainee on equity investing as a quant. You should be good with numbers, but I wasn’t. I wrote a quantitative model that selected  companies to invest in in the US equity markets. It blew up spectacularly. Luckily there was no real money in the model. I moved to investing in corporate bonds as a portfolio manager fixed income. I had Lehman Brothers, Icelandic Banks… all went bankrupt in no-time. A nightmare. So I moved to sovereign bonds, at the same time I started at PGGM. Then in 2012 sovereign bonds in Europe blew up spectacularly as well. So it seems every asset class I touch, ends up in tears. The last couple of years at PGGM I started looking into sustainable finance, especially within fixed income. That might be the next bubble which is about to burst...’

Why PGGM?
Wilfried loved investing more than anything else, but investing at DSM was secondary to the corporate. So after four years he decided to move to a place where investing was the core of the company, which is PGGM.

‘Sovereign bonds sound a bit dull, especially when interest rates are around 0%, but they are the safe place of investments for pension funds. The liability side of the pension fund moves and we are the counterweight. We want make sure the coverage ratio of PFZW doesn’t move from 80 to 110 to 90, but stabilizes around 110, preferably 120. Furthermore, as an institutional – and long term – investor we can contribute to the 350 billion of extra investments the European Union needs to get to the climate targets. Sovereign bonds are a big part of that. And with the size we have we can add non-financial returns with those kinds of investments, for example by influencing policymakers and governments. It’s not only about financial returns. It’s also about giving back to society.’

What makes your day?
When Wilfried opens up his agenda and sees a meeting with issuers, it makes his day. ‘Those could be government issuers or government related issuers like the World Bank, but also a meeting with the ministry of Finance in the Netherlands or Germany. I like the talks on economics, politics and sustainability. But also about the bonds they issued, how their green bonds are trying to make an impact in society and whether that impact aligns with what we try to explain to our clients and participants in the end.’