GreenFundAsia Strategic Memo

Background and Context

Who I am: I’m Nicolas Payen, a strategist in the climate finance space. In 2017, I co-founded Positive Energy Ltd — a Singapore-based climate fintech pioneering digital tools to accelerate clean infrastructure investment.

What we built: From 2017 to 2020, Positive Energy Ltd was at the forefront of climate finance innovation. We developed a unique digital platform to digitize project origination, ESG scoring, and early-stage transaction enablement. Despite early success and international recognition, the lack of sustained institutional support and funding prevented the founding team from fully executing its vision.

The European angle: During that time, I collaborated with a Belgian impact fund manager to develop the GreenFundEU concept — a mission-driven structure aimed at addressing the double missing middle: the limited access to finance for SMEs and early-stage projects in Europe.

Why Asia now: As project financing in emerging markets is even more challenging than in Europe, the core principles and technologies behind GreenFundEU are highly translatable to Asia. A tailored version — GreenFundAsia — could powerfully support regional blended finance initiatives like Fast-P by improving early-stage deal sourcing, risk scoring, and concessional capital matching.

Executive Summary

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is launching Fast-P to unlock clean energy investment in the region through blended capital strategies. As funding flows increase, pipeline development, de-risking, and alignment with international sustainability frameworks become key enablers.

This memo outlines how adapting the GreenFundEU model to Asia could support Fast-P and similar programs by:

Enabling digital-first, early-stage project origination
Enhancing ESG tagging and investment-readiness scoring
Facilitating blended capital flows through transparent structuring
Accelerating cross-border funding decisions and platform-based collaboration

Strategic Adaptation for Asia

Why It Matters

Asian infrastructure developers face major hurdles in accessing early-stage finance
Risk perception and fragmentation slow project validation and capital flows
Digital tools can bridge trust gaps and attract catalytic co-investors

What GreenFundAsia Offers

A modular platform to source and score projects across emerging Asia
Structured ESG and investment-readiness metrics aligned to international norms
Support for public, philanthropic, and private capital coordination

What MAS and Regional Partners Could Add

Institutional support and capital frameworks for blended deployment
Governance and validation infrastructure
Integration with Fast-P and similar regional initiatives

Digital and Blended Finance Synergy

GreenFundAsia is not about launching a new fund. It is about embedding proven digital tools into Asia’s blended finance architecture — from origination to deployment. It offers a flexible layer to accelerate marginally bankable projects, match them to appropriate capital, and monitor outcomes transparently.

About Me and the Vision

Over the past decade, I’ve focused on one of the most overlooked bottlenecks in the energy transition: how to originate and de-risk early-stage, SME-scale infrastructure in emerging markets. From 2017 to 2020, I led a climate fintech in Singapore — Positive Energy Ltd — that built a digital platform to do just that, enabling taxonomy-aligned origination, ESG scoring, and blended finance structuring.

At the time, we lacked the institutional support to scale, despite growing traction. Today, the policy landscape has changed: with Fast-P and other regional blended finance programs emerging, I believe this infrastructure can now fulfill its original purpose — accelerating clean infrastructure investment where it is most needed.

I am not proposing to manage a fund again. Instead, I offer a tested and modular tool that could be embedded into existing ecosystems to unlock capital, strengthen project pipelines, and improve investment readiness at scale.