Anthony Hobley and Sergey Ivliev join NCR's leadership
NCR has added two senior figures to its leadership: Anthony Hobley, until recently Deputy Chair of Climate, Risk &Resilience at Howden Group and former CEO of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, who joins as a Senior Strategic Advisor; and Sergey Ivliev, Founder and Chairman of Vlinder, joins as Partner leading product and technology. Their appointments deepens NCR's bench in climate finance, policy, and ratings technology as the firm prepares for its first sovereign engagements.
Anthony brings more than three decades at the frontier of climate finance, law, and policy. At Howden Group, the global insurance and reinsurance broker, he served as Deputy Chair of Climate, Risk& Resilience, where he helped establish insurance as critical infrastructure for mobilising climate and resilience finance, working with governments, multilateral institutions, the High-Level Climate Champions Team and the CoP29 and CoP30 Presidencies. He previously led the Carbon Tracker Initiative as CEO, served as Executive Director of the Mission Possible Partnership, a collaboration between the World Economic Forum the Energy Transitions Commission, Rocky Mountain Institute and the We Mean Business Coalition and was a Partner and Global Head of Sustainability & Climate Finance at Norton Rose Fulbright. He helped shape the UK pilot emissions trading scheme and key aspects of the EU ETS, sat on the board of the Verified Carbon Standard(now Verra), and in 2014 addressed the UN Climate Summit at the invitation of the UN Secretary-General. At NCR he will guide strategy, policy positioning, and engagement with sovereign and institutional partners.
"We do not have a climate data problem, we have a translation problem. The data exists in volumes never before assembled, but it reaches capital allocators as scores and scenarios, the language of screening, not as price, the language of valuation.
NCR is building exactly the rigorous, ratings-driven infrastructure to close that gap, to take climate and nature analytics from screening to valuation and express them in the units a credit committee, a finance ministry or a bond market already uses.
I've known Shandi for more than twenty years, and across that time he has consistently been ahead of the market in seeing where environmental finance needs to go next."
— Anthony Hobley, Senior Strategic Advisor, NCR
Sergey is the Founder and Board Chair of Vlinder, a mangrove restoration project developer. A quantitative economist by training, holding a Ph.D. in Mathematical Economics, he has spent his career building data, AI, and market infrastructure across climate and capital markets, and previously co-founded the fintech firm Lykke. He also teaches blockchain and crypto finance at HEC Lausanne and the New Economic School. At NCR he will lead product and technology, overseeing the AI-driven rating systems, analytics, and data pipelines that turn complex ecological data in to the investable signals underpinning the firm's marine biodiversity instruments.
"This speaks directly to what I see as my personal mission: risk management at a planetary scale. I've spent my career building the data and market infrastructure that lets capital price what truly matters — and nothing matters more than the living systems we all depend on. NCR gives us the means to measure marine biodiversity with scientific rigor and turn it into something investors can actually act on."
— Dr. Sergey Ivliev, Partner, Product &Technology, NCR
Together, the appointments mark a step-change in NCR's capacity to translate natural-capital science into investable, sovereign-scale instruments. The firm continues to build a coalition of financial, policy, and scientific partners aimed at exceeding global 30x30conservation targets.
About Natural Capital Reserve
Natural Capital Reserve (NCR) provides the world's first sovereign marine biodiversity investment ratings, alongside analytical tools that measure corporate carbon liabilities and a ratings suite for marine biodiversity investment intelligence at sovereign scale.
NCR was co-founded by Dr Shandi Modi, founder of IDEAcarbon, and co-founder of Natural Capital Reserve, and an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics. With more than 25 years of experience in financial markets — as anadvisor to governments, policymakers, hedge funds and proprietary traders — he founded IDEAglobal as well as IDEAcarbon. Through IDEAcarbon and The Carbon Ratings Agency, he has advised the Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, and the Stateof Gujarat on its state climate policy framework; Arnold Schwarzenegger's R20Regions Group; and the United Nations Global Compact's Carbon Pricing Champions.