Executive, Impact Risk and Policy 6 month FTC Secondment - Location Global

About BII

British International Investment (BII) is the UK’s leading development finance institution, wholly owned by the UK Government. Our primary mission is to address global development challenges through strategic investments that promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth.

BII focuses on catalysing economic development, creating jobs, and building resilient economies in some of the world's most complex and underserved markets. We invest in businesses and projects that prioritise inclusive development, environmental sustainability, and innovation.

Our approach is characterised by rigorous investment standards, high governance principles, and a commitment to delivering measurable development impact. Our team consists of highly skilled and passionate professionals dedicated to making a tangible difference globally.

We foster a collaborative and intellectually stimulating work environment that values curiosity, innovation, and professional growth. Our culture balances high performance with a strong emphasis on wellbeing, ensuring our employees can achieve their full potential while contributing to our mission.

BII at a glance:

Over 75 years supporting sustainable business growth in developing and emerging markets

More than £9.9 billion in net assets

1,600+ businesses invested in

950,000+ workers in the businesses we support

650+ people in our diverse global team

3 key development objectives: Productive | Sustainable | Inclusive

Team and role overview:

BII’s Impact Group has a range of specialists who support meeting of its impact, sustainability and other development objectives. This includes the development and implementation of the impact scoring methodology, implementation of the PRI, climate, gender & diversity finance approaches. The 2026–31 strategy calls for market level impact, frontier market expansion, active mobilisation, and partnership by default with EDFI/MDB peers. Delivering these ambitions requires strong, coherent and well assured policy, clear risk appetite guidance, and cross functional integration across the entire Impact Group (IG).

The Impact Risk and Policy (IRP) team sits within the Office of the Chief Impact Officer and is responsible for developing and overseeing IG investment policies, including the PRI and Fossil Fuel Policy (FFP), and managing day-to-day policy interpretation across the portfolio. IRP holds a formal 1.5line assurance role for PRI 2.0 and the Fossil Fuel Policy (FFP), assessing whether policy interpretation and implementation remain within Board endorsed risk appetite.

The team engage with external stakeholders to stay updated on policy trends and support the harmonisation of MDB/DFI standards. The team designs and delivers risk appetite frameworks, risk management tools, disclosures, integrating learnings on IG risks into BII-wide strategies, and ensuring alignment with best practices and regulatory requirements. The team is also responsible for supporting the Compliance team on complaints handling and supports IG-wide stakeholder issues and queries.

As a central team focussed on impact policy and risk the team provides coherence across risk, standards, accountability and assurance that underpin how the whole of IG operates. IRP therefore works horizontally across all IG teams, and with teams outside of IG including Risk, Legal, Compliance, Investment, OCIO, Strategy. This cross‑functional role ensures consistent policy interpretation, risk alignment and robust integration of impact risk into BII’s strategy. This is a new and agile team, offering successful candidates’ great opportunities to apply strategic, policy and execution skills while remaining closely anchored to BII’s investment activities.

Responsibilities

The Executive will work across all team activities to build up foundational skills and experience across all risk, strategy and policy matters as follows:

IG Policy

• Lead research and benchmarking of policy matters to support policy interpretation of both the PRI and FFP, working closely with RI and Climate teams
• Support the development of IG/RI policy or positions or stakeholder queries for matters arising from the new strategy or existing portfolio including Responsible Exits, Remedy, Responsible AI working closely with subject matter experts across RI/IG
• Support the implementation of PRI 2.0 assurance process
• Manage RI policy architecture and document control, working closely with BII’s Co-Sec and Governance team including clear tracking, logging and monitoring of changes and review and update on policy interpretation materials
• Develop and roll out trainings and tools to transaction facing teams on emerging policy matters that would help to improve portfolio risk management
• Support the policy and process assessments of DFI/MDBs as part of qualifying partners to enable MOUs and partnership by default strategy

IG Risk

• Support the expansion, assurance, integration and consistency of IG risk scorecards to ensure coherence and relevance for risk management
• Data gathering and analysis to support IG risk projects cross functionally such as PSI 2.0/impact risk integration, integration of impact risk into risk team methodologies and identify other opportunities to further the quantification and integration of impact risk into BII frameworks
• Engage in broader industry developments to maintain/adopt relevant ESG risk management approaches
• Support the enhancement of contextual/conflict risk assessment methodology, to support frontier market pipeline/portfolio

Issues Management

• Lead the team responding to external accountability stakeholders (e.g. CSOs, NGOs, FCDO) re. policy and risk management queries working with other relevant IG teams where needed
• Support the management of external complaints handling, working with Compliance, Head of IRP, Head of RI and any other relevant IRP and RI team members to assess eligibility of complaints and guide pathways to respond to the complainant
• Maintain and monitor the team issues management database, identify trends and how that this can be used to bolster risk management

ESG Regulations and Disclosures

• Support research and internal/external stakeholder engagement to ensure the team maintains up to date knowledge and expertise on ESG regulations and disclosures including SDR/SFDR, CSRD, UK ISSB/SRS, TNFD to advance BII’s corporate disclosure framework working cross-functionally across BII
• Lead PRI/ESG related disclosures including maintenance and update of website disclosures related to Responsible Investment framework
• Support response to external reporting and benchmarking including UNPRI, PWYF, WBA etc

The candidate

Background, skills, aptitude

Good Understanding of IG policies and areas of activity including the PRI, development impact, climate, gender finance and an appetite to transfer existing skill set to deliver cross-functional activities:

• Cross-product transactional experience and understanding of BII’s IC process.
• Strong research and quantitative skills in the fields of ESG/climate/impact risk
• Good understanding of E&S, Business Integrity, Governance, Climate and Impact topics across BII’s portfolio.
• Strong project management and interpersonal skills
• Appreciation of risks and policy issues in BII’s markets and ability to effectively assess and prioritise them.
• Skilled or interest in acting as an intermediary to key internal and external stakeholders including Investment and Impact Group Team, and corporate functions at a senior level.
• Proven track record of collaborating for problem-solving and strong critical thinking
• Ability to stay abreast of emerging themes and trends in impact risk and policy, and identify and where relevant, drive thought leadership efforts in this area.
• Appetite to build networks across DFIs, MDBs and ESG/impact industry
• Candidates should be strongly motivated by BII’s development mission and ideally demonstrate some commitment to development or social goals through previous executive or non-executive activity.

Our cultural values

We look for team members who aspire, as we do, to work at our best and to be:

• Impact-led, commercially rigorous
• Tenacious in the face of challenges
• Collaborative and caring

British International Investment is committed to diversity and inclusion and welcomes all applicants regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation or educational background.