Paris Infraweek: Pierre PALMIERI

First, the financing and investment needs in infrastructure are considerable. To achieve the sustainable development goals defined by the United Nations, the necessary investments are counted in tens of trillions in the coming years, and across all regions.

Clearly, the energy transition is probably one of the most significant developments and will mobilize enormous resources. First in renewables: wind, solar, carbon capture, and all the infrastructure linked to renewables, hydrogen development plans. On the other side, energy efficiency and decarbonization — for example in transport, in construction, where there are also considerable challenges. Land mobility will play a considerable role given the sector's share of global emissions.

So we see really significant developments in renewables, renewable financing, and everything related to energy efficiency. Then there are other major projects linked to digital transformation — for example, fiber deployment. We see very important investment needs; in France much has already been done, but in countries like Germany, the UK, investment requirements are on the order of 50 billion. And then data centers, which are part of this great digital transformation and represent assets that will require significant financing.

For emerging countries, the difficulty is that on one hand the needs are considerable — to achieve sustainable development goals, Africa's share will be extremely important. But at the same time, there is an imbalance in the capacity to mobilize financial resources relative to the immensity of the needs.

What is important for these infrastructure financings to come together: first, a strong mobilization of existing mechanisms, notably public insurers who have contributed to emerging market development for decades and are adapting their approach. Second, optimized mobilization of all actors — industrials best placed to take technological and industrial risks, public insurers, multilateral banks, investors, local authorities, local funders. The needs are such that we cannot afford not to optimize financing; each actor must intervene in an optimized manner.

Each euro or dollar invested by multilaterals or the public sector should attract as much private liquidity as possible. Through a good reallocation of risks among all these actors, we can attract much liquidity — the liquidity exists in the world, it is considerable. Investors simply need to be reassured about the bankability and feasibility of these projects.

Having a strong local component is extremely important — you can't do everything from the outside. Local funders must be sufficiently invested. A major challenge for infrastructure in emerging countries is the structural currency risk — debt in dollars or euros against revenues in local currencies. Having local financing is essential.

This is one of Societe Generale's strengths: it mobilizes both its financing and investment banking teams and local teams, because we have an extremely extensive network in Africa, which gives us good understanding of the local environment and a competitive advantage.

Finally, we need to think about working upstream on broader policies — before tenders are launched, all stakeholders should reflect on, for example, a country's energy policy, so that feasibility is considered from the outset.

The last point, very important, is that innovation will also be a solution in emerging countries. We have teams that think about new models of tomorrow. For example, micro-energy generation in more remote, desert areas — off-grid solutions that bring electricity where it doesn't exist, enabling economic development and education.

This is what we call a pay-as-you-go approach, which leverages digitalization to develop these new models, measure their impacts, and bring additional financing capacity from a different pool of investors. Thanks to digital, we can measure impacts more precisely and make projects bankable that are not currently bankable because they are too small and uneconomical. This innovation and these new models are really part of the solution for tomorrow.