Finance Innovation Specialist

Summary

Join EIT Climate-KIC's Capital & Investment team as a Finance Innovation Specialist for a 1-year fixed-term contract (with potential renewal). Based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, or the UK, you will play a crucial role in driving forward key deals and attracting investment into innovative climate action projects. This involves analyzing funding needs, designing fundraising strategies, engaging stakeholders, and fostering collaboration across public and private sectors. The role requires a relevant academic degree, 3-5 years of experience in financial services, and strong skills in financial instruments, system thinking, and stakeholder engagement. Climate-KIC offers a flexible work environment with remote or hybrid options.

Requirements

• Relevant academic degree in financial services
• 3-5 years working experience in financial services
• Proven experience of fundraising and engagement with public / private sector financing institutions
• Fluent in English
• Ability to work remotely and digitally across multiple organisations with collaborative IT applications (we use Office365 and Microsoft Teams, as well as Miro, Zoom, etc.)
• Advanced understanding of different financial instruments and their applicability to different scenarios
• Understanding of system thinking and how to use innovation to influence system dynamics
• Candidates must have the right to work in the location they’re applying for (I.e. not require visa sponsorship) prior to applying for the position

Responsibilities

• Analyze the funding needs expressed by individual innovation projects, and integrate these needs into a wider funding plan that accounts for differing levels of maturity
• Design and implement a fundraising strategy that matches these needs to suitable instruments and attracts multiple different stakeholders to invest into the integrated funding plan
• Engage key stakeholders manage funding partnerships with the Net Zero Cities Capital Hub and Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine
• Act as key point of contact on financial innovation on projects, including facilitation of working groups and collaborative initiatives defined in project plans
• Collaborate with our community of investment innovation partners to build a strong community of practice in the field of investing for system transformation
• Identify opportunities for strategic partnerships to build out investment funds to support large scale financing across regions
• Map financial and market dynamics in a country, region and city and identify financial innovation opportunities
• Assess projects identified by EIT Climate-KIC teams for financial viability and provide advice on the range of financial mechanisms that match
• Foster collaboration between public and private sector financial institutions to develop large scale investment programmes with high impact potential
• Provide guidance and education to public sector employees around options to leverage public and private financing for greater action

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in project finance, business development and execution, with a primary focus on sustainable finance
• Experience working in a private sector financial services institution, ideally including experience Working on large scale infrastructure investment structuring or complex project financing deals
• Exposure to Irish finance ecosystem
• Experience or willingness to build out expertise around system mapping programs (e.g. Exaptive, Kumo) to visualise complex environments and build stakeholder buy-in

Benefits

• We’re happy to discuss your situation during the interview and see how best we can support you
• We offer a high degree of flexibility to accommodate all working patterns
• We support fully remote or hybrid forms of working and offer a high degree of flexibility