chrissa pagitsas

• Building Green Finance That Scales
  Pagitsas built the world's largest Green Bond business from zero to $51 billion at a Fortune 50 company. She shows leaders how green and social finance moves from concept to market-defining scale — and how to make sustainability a driver of real financial value.
• ESG Strategy That Survives Scrutiny
  Drawing on her book of interviews with CSOs at Coca-Cola, Amazon, and BlackRock, Pagitsas offers a practical playbook for embedding ESG into the core of a business — beyond reporting and marketing — so it withstands regulatory and investor pressure.
• The Chief Sustainability Officer's Playbook
  Pagitsas distills what distinguishes effective sustainability leaders: how they build strategy, manage change, engage boards, and turn ambitious goals into measurable results across complex Fortune 500 organizations.
• Leading Through Uncertainty and Transformation
  Pagitsas helps executives and boards navigate a volatile ESG landscape — making bold, calculated decisions that align sustainability with corporate priorities and build resilient, future-ready organizations.

speaker Bio: 

Chrissa Pagitsas is a global expert on ESG, climate risk, and green finance, best known for building one of the most consequential sustainable-finance businesses in the world. As the first Vice President of ESG at Fannie Mae, she launched the enterprise's ESG strategy and grew its Green Financing Business from inception to more than $51 billion in Green Bonds — making Fannie Mae the largest issuer of Green Bonds globally. Along the way she drove market-transforming innovations, including the first Green Commercial mortgage-backed security in the United States and the EPA's ENERGY STAR score for multifamily housing.

Today the CEO of Pagitsas Advisors and a senior advisor to McKinsey & Co., she counsels C-suites and boards on strategic transformation at the intersection of sustainability and business. She is the author of the Amazon bestseller Chief Sustainability Officers at Work, a collection of in-depth interviews with sustainability leaders at Fortune 500 companies, and was named a "Green Bond Champion" by the Climate Bonds Initiative and honored with a US Green Building Council Leadership Award. She holds an MBA from the University of Virginia's Darden School and a BA from Johns Hopkins.

Summary (Core Conviction):

Pagitsas's distinguishing credibility is that she didn't theorize about green finance — she built it, at scale, inside one of the largest financial institutions in the world. Her central argument is that sustainability succeeds only when it is engineered into the core financial machinery of a business, not bolted on as reporting or marketing. The $51 billion Green Bond program is her proof point: a market-defining business that delivered measurable value precisely because it was treated as finance first, not as a side initiative. Through her book and advisory work, she translates that hard-won, operational perspective into a playbook for other leaders — how to set ambitious goals, win board buy-in, and convert ESG ambition into instruments and outcomes that survive scrutiny. For audiences, she offers the rare voice that pairs sustainability conviction with the discipline of a builder who has actually delivered the numbers.

speaker Videos:

Explore keynote speakers, topics & insights

Keynote Topics & Curated Speaker Examples→

Insights & Strategic Deep Dives →

Keynote Speakers →