LGX: A Decade as Sustainable Finance’s Essential Cog

Ten years on, drawing up the decade’s balance sheet, Julie Becker, chief executive of the Luxembourg Stock Exchange and founder of LGX, believes that “our initial commitment has only grown in strength over the years” and that the outcome is “extremely positive.” The figures also substantiate this: At the LGX’s launch, the Luxembourg Stock Exchange was already home to 114 green bonds. Years prior, it was selected as the listing venue of what is known as the world’s first green bond, the Climate Awareness Bond issued by the European Investment Bank in 2007. At the time, green bonds represented barely one per cent of the total volume of bonds outstanding. Today, their share stands at 11%, having peaked at 18% in 2024 before absorbing the shock of global geopolitical events. An unshakeable world leader for a decade, with a 41% share of the global sustainable bond market in 2026, LGX currently encompasses more than 2,400 sustainable bonds for a combined total value of €1.3 trillion.

Simple rules, high transparency standards

For Julie Becker, this success is explained “by the introduction of relatively simple rules combined with high transparency standards, and by the fact that green or sustainable bonds are among the most effective financial tool for achieving the objectives set out at the Paris conference. Many issuers need financing for infrastructure projects, which are typically financed through bonds.” Since its creation, LGX has also accumulated a string of awards. The most notable is without a doubt the United Nations Global Climate Action Award received in 2020. Moreover, the Luxembourg Stock Exchange has also taken home the “Exchange of the Year” title awarded by Environmental Finance as part of its Sustainable Debt Awards eighth times in ten years, as recently as in April 2026. The secret? “We innovate constantly. Every year is a milestone,” Becker highlights.

Indeed, the range of bonds displayed on LGX has expanded quickly. In the course of 2017, the platform broadened its scope to include social bonds, followed by sustainability bonds. A section dedicated to SRI funds was created in 2018, and sustainability-linked bonds were introduced in 2020. In 2022, LGX started flagging gender-focused bonds following the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the Luxembourg Stock Exchange and UN Women. The aim was above all to ensure visibility and to steer investors towards products that contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment (SDG 5), notably by improving women’s access to financing. “This is a development that is particularly close to my heart and one that is progressing well. We currently have more than 500 gender-focused bonds at LuxSE,” says Becker.

Supporting transition strategies

Another important shift was made in 2025 with the launch of the “Transition Finance Gateway.” This new strategy stems from the observation that today’s investors no longer settle for financing isolated environmental, social or sustainability projects. They want access to the information that will allow them to understand the overall strategy of the issuer, so as to be able to support it through its transition strategy. “Our objective is to allow our issuers, particularly non-financial corporate issuers active in hard-to-abate sectors, to continue to access capital markets, while also encouraging credible transition strategies that enable them to genuinely transform their business models,” explains the chief executive of the Luxembourg stock exchange.

While she is pleased with a decade of continuous evolution, she nonetheless points to 2020 as a pivotal year for sustainable finance. In a year marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, LGX kept moving forward and succeeded in bringing a structured response to two obstacles the market still had to overcome: education in sustainable finance, and access to data.

New initiatives to advance sustainable finance

Creating the LGX Academy was the solution to the first challenge: initially, its role was to raise awareness of the ins and outs of sustainable finance among investors, law firms, financial professionals, market participants and students, in order to accelerate capital flows into this new segment of the market. Today, its work has grown in scope: the LGX Academy teams of experts travel to Africa, Latin America or Southeast Asia to share the expertise built up over the years and to help develop the sustainable bond market in the parts of the world that need investment the most, particularly in the fight against global warming. Alongside this educational pillar, the Luxembourg Stock Exchange has also developed LGX Assistance Services, which aims to support issuers through the process of launching or reporting on a sustainable bond.

To tackle the second challenge and enable better oversight, the LGX Data Hub was brought to market in September 2020. It functions as a centralised database of information extracted from the non-financial documentation required of sustainable bond issuers, both before and after issuance. When it was launched, the LGX DataHub provided information on the around 850 sustainable bonds then listed on LuxSE and displayed on LGX. It has since been expanded to cover 26,000 labelled bonds worldwide, with up to 200 data points collected for each bond. To further refine this offering, the Luxembourg Stock Exchange acquired the ESG data analysis unit of the Luxembourg start-up Tetrao International, which specialises in extracting large volumes of data using artificial intelligence. For Julie Becker, a tool of this kind, combined with human quality controls, makes it easier to access the vast volumes of data on sustainable bonds worldwide, including those not displayed on LuxSE.

The Luxembourg Stock Exchange’s platform is not the Luxembourg financial centre’s first initiative to promote sustainable finance. A decade earlier, the agency LuxFlag had already played a pioneering role by developing a labelling process for investment funds. However, LGX rapidly became a driving force making Luxembourg a central player in this space. “Our platform has largely contributed to putting Luxembourg on the global sustainable finance map. Having been the first Green Exchange, we expected to be copied. Yet, after a decade, we have managed to maintain a leading global market share despite the rapid expansion of sustainable finance,” Becker says with satisfaction. It is an advantage that she and her teams will seek to preserve going forward, by continuing to emphasise a strategy built on strong transparency requirements, which have quickly proven their effectiveness.