Marat Zapparov didn’t plan to end up in infrastructure finance. Born in Moscow, schooled in the UK, and armed with an accounting qualification he wasn’t sure he wanted — he stumbled into the world of project finance at HSBC Hong Kong just as the GFC was tearing through London. That pivot changed everything.
What followed was 15 years of building at the sharp end of Asian infrastructure — from HSBC’s project finance team in Hong Kong, to Clifford Capital in Singapore’s early days to the IFC, and finally to co-founding Pentagreen Capital — a debt financing platform backed by HSBC and Temasek to solve one of Asia’s most stubborn problems: getting private capital into sustainable infrastructure in markets where others won’t go.
In this conversation, Marat opens up about what it really takes to operate in frontier markets — Bangladesh, Myanmar, the Philippines — where the deals are harder, the risks are real, and the rewards for getting it right are significant. He shares the principle that stuck with him from early in his career: you need at least one deal to go wrong. If you’ve never had one, you’ve never pushed the boundary.
We get into the state of development finance and whether multilaterals like the IFC are still fit for purpose in 2026, why Trump cutting USAID funding has raised uncomfortable questions about where the money actually goes, and what blended finance can — and can’t — do to close Asia’s infrastructure gap.
Marat also gives his take on where the biggest opportunities in Asian infrastructure are right now: data centres, energy security, and why the answer is never as simple as just picking one sector and going all in.