Jason Mortimer's ability to identify risks the market fails to price, build systems to capture them and demonstrate that sustainability can strengthen investment performance has earned him the Investment leader of the year accolade in this year's Sustainable Investment Awards.

Having held positions at First Sentier Investors, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, he built his career in emerging markets, sovereign credit and derivatives trading, where understanding unpriced risk is central to investment success. Working across Asian bond markets, he saw how governance failures and information asymmetries could damage portfolios long before global investors recognised the warning signs.

That experience shaped his conviction that sustainability data could provide an investment edge.

The philosophy has underpinned Mortimer's work as head of sustainable investment for fixed income at Nomura Asset Management and helped establish him as an influential voice in sustainable fixed income and transition finance across Asia.

When Mortimer joined Nomura in 2017, sustainable finance in fixed income was relatively nascent in Japan. Rather than importing foreign frameworks wholesale, he saw an opportunity to build a sustainable investment platform grounded in risk-and-return fundamentals, quantitative analysis and Japan's emerging perspective on transition.

He says the freedom he was given by Nomura's chief investment officer proved transformative.

"I realised sustainability data could help overcome information asymmetry," he adds. "If you can systematically identify and price governance, climate or social risks, you can send a signal to the market, as well as outperform."

At Nomura, Mortimer developed quantitative models which integrated governance indicators, corruption metrics, sustainability data and novel alternative datasets into sovereign and corporate credit analysis.

By 2019, Nomura had secured institutional mandates and launched Japan's first multi-asset ESG retail funds built on Mortimer's framework.

Mortimer's models helped identify downside risks that traditional credit analysis missed, avoiding exposure to bankruptcies and emerging market crises, including Wirecard, Sri Lanka, Zambia and Ecuador. Most notably, Nomura's sustainable investment strategies exited Russian sovereign exposure prior to the invasion of Ukraine, while many peer ESG funds remained invested.

"That was the real 'aha' moment," Mortimer says. "A lot of ESG investing at the time was being treated as a marketing exercise. For us, it was a fundamental part of the investment process."

This insistence on materiality is one of Mortimer's defining leadership traits. Throughout his career, he has challenged conventional thinking around sustainable finance, encouraging the market to move beyond exclusionary approaches towards more sophisticated forms of risk pricing and transition investing.

Long before transition finance became mainstream, Mortimer argued that the industry's binary "green versus brown" approach risked creating portfolios that delivered paper decarbonisation with little real-world impact.

"Portfolio decarbonisation often has no effect on actual emissions," he says. "You can simply exclude heavy emitters and create a low-carbon portfolio, but nothing changes in the real economy."

Instead, he became an early advocate of transition investing focused on issuer credibility, forward-looking transition plans, and non-exclusion of hard-to-abate sectors.

Recently, Mortimer has concentrated on methane abatement, which he believes represents one of the most immediate and cost-effective opportunities for reducing global emissions.

"The data is available," he says. "Once investors realise methane abatement performance can be measured, priced and reported, it becomes a mainstream issue very quickly."

He has also pushed sustainable investing into new territory through work on cybersecurity and resilience risk. Mortimer identified cyber risk as a financially material governance issue years before it became widely discussed within sustainable finance. By integrating quantitative cyber risk ratings into investment analysis, his team was able to identify and act on vulnerabilities ahead of several market-moving corporate cyber incidents.

For Mortimer, this reflects a broader evolution in sustainable investing, with increasing emphasis on resilience, supply-chain, and geopolitical risks alongside climate and governance.

"I've always tried to ask: what's the market not picking up on? And how can we use a sustainability data lens to systematically and objectively integrate that into our process?" he says.

That forward-looking mindset has also made him influential beyond portfolio management. Fluent in Japanese and deeply embedded in both Asian and European sustainable finance networks, Mortimer has helped connect Japanese policymakers, regulators and investors with global market developments.

Throughout his career, his vision has remained consistent: "If you can align better risk-adjusted returns with solving major global challenges, that's when sustainable investing truly becomes mainstream."