IJGlobal Investor Outstanding Individual – Joe Lufkin

The independent panel of judges for the APAC chapter of the IJGlobal Investor Awards 2025 selected Joseph Lufkin – founder and group managing director of Jexium – to win the regional outstanding individual trophy.

The award was presented to Joe (pictured below) this evening at the awards ceremony hosted in The Westin Singapore.

Joe has been operating across Asia for the last 3 decades and has long worked at the intersection of infrastructure, energy, climate, development, finance and systems across the region.

He has been involved with the Asian Development Bank since 1998 on a wide range of funds, facilities and transactions.

These range from multisector infra funds to renewable energy, transport, irrigation, urban infrastructure projects, and much more beyond.

He was a pioneer in the mid aughties, raising awareness among UK and European investors to opportunities across Asian infrastructure.

This included speaking at an early IJGlobal conference, one of the famed events hosted at (at the named) Turnberry Resort in Scotland, then chairing a series of infrastructure investment conferences 2007-12 in Singapore, Doha and Hong Kong.

Besides the “normal” places where most folk work across the region, Joe’s fieldwork in Asia Pacific infrastructure has taken him from Apia, Pohnpei, Majuro and Honiara to Vientiane, Peshawar, Ulaanbaatar and Shymkent, giving him a rooted understanding of realities in public infrastructure across the region.

A recurring theme in Joe’s career has been how infrastructure projects actually reach bankability. Seeing the obvious gaps in the market, he has long worked to improve the quality of project preparation and development in Asia Pacific.

Among his accomplishments at ADB have been the design and establishment of the Asia Pacific Carbon Fund I that pioneered ADB’s successful series of climate/carbon funds; the Cities Development Initiative for Asia (CDIA); the Asia Pacific Project Preparation Facility (AP3F); the China CDM Fund; and the Shandong Green Development Fund; as well as work for the Pacific Regional Infrastructure Facility.

Joe and his Jexium colleagues also re-vamped the African Development Bank’s Urban and Municipal Development Fund in 2021-23, and with the Islamic Development Bank on Islamic infrastructure finance products for its member countries.

To systematise ways to improve Asia Pacific public project preparation, Joe conceived and led the ADB team that – from 2009-14 – built the first cloud-based platform for public sector infrastructure developers.

Originally funded by ADB and the Korean government’s eAsia fund at ADB, the resulting National Infrastructure Information Systems platform grew into the Sustainable Infrastructure Foundation (SIF) in Geneva and its SOURCE platform, now supported by all multilateral development banks and used around the world to develop public infrastructure projects.

Current engagements include a pioneering multi-borrower securitised bond issue backed by a portfolio of loans to developers of energy and cleantech infrastructure projects, ongoing planning for a new ADB / UNIDO / GEF Chemicals and Wastes Financing Partnership Facility to mobilise private investment into green industrial infrastructure to cut pollution in Asia Pacific, and a partnership with a leading AI firm to bring the benefits and power to ‘reflexive’ AI systems to the development finance and emerging markets infrastructure finance globally.