As Jörg Frieden steps down after eight years as Chair of SIFEM’s Board of Directors, and Mirjam Staub-Bisang takes up the role, the outgoing and incoming chairs sit down together to reflect on impact, conviction, and the business of putting capital to good use.
As Jörg Frieden steps down after eight years as Chair of SIFEM’s Board of Directors, and Mirjam Staub-Bisang takes up the role, the outgoing and incoming chairs sit down together to reflect on impact, conviction, and the business of putting capital to good use.
There is a particular quiet that settles over an institution at the moment of a handover. When that moment arrived at the EDFI Annual Meeting in Lugano, bringing together the development finance community from across Europe, the setting could hardly have been more fitting. It offered a rare opportunity to look up from the day-to-day demands of the portfolio and take stock.
For SIFEM, Switzerland’s development finance institution, this was such a moment. One chapter was coming to an end, another beginning, and the transition offered an opportunity not only to look back with gratitude, but also to look forward with confidence and purpose.
For eight years, Jörg Frieden has chaired SIFEM’s Board of Directors, guiding the institution through a period of considerable growth and through an organisational redesign that has sharpened how it measures the difference it makes. A development practitioner and diplomat before he took the chair in 2018, with postings that ran from Mozambique to the World Bank in Washington and an ambassadorship in Nepal, he has spent his professional life at the meeting point of public purpose and private capital. He hands over to Mirjam Staub-Bisang, Chair of BlackRock Switzerland and one of the prominent voices in sustainable finance in the country, who succeeded to the position of Chair of the SIFEM Board on 1 June 2026.
It was in Lugano, with the European DFI community assembled around them, that we asked them to sit together and reflect on this transition.
Jörg Frieden does not reach first for the numbers, though the numbers have been good. Pressed on the highlights of his tenure, his answer comes without hesitation:
“People on the ground receiving support, being able to develop themselves, their families, building a business,” he says. “Ultimately, it is about real people doing real things.”
It is a telling place for a chairman to begin. SIFEM finances small and growing companies in developing and emerging economies, and the abstractions of development finance, the indicators and the impact frameworks, exist to serve something that is finally very human. Jörg Frieden has clearly never lost sight of that.
Mirjam Staub-Bisang arrives from a different angle, that of asset management and institutional investing, and her first observation as she steps into the development finance institution is about the room itself.
“What strikes me is the quality of the discussion in the room,” she says, “and how people navigate an incredibly difficult environment, holding development impact, financial performance, public policy and national interest in the same conversation.”
That balancing act, the simultaneous pull of returns and results, of mandate and market, is indeed the defining tension of any DFI that merits continued critical debate.
The most candid moment comes when Frieden is asked what single piece of advice he would offer his successor. He does not hedge.
“Do what you believe. Stay firm on your values and try to convince others. And be patient, because it will take time, and the environment is difficult.”
It is the counsel of someone who has learned that conviction without patience achieves little in this field, and that patience without conviction achieves less. Coming at a moment when the case for development finance is being openly questioned in many quarters, it lands as something more than a parting pleasantry.
Asked where she expects to make her own mark, Staub-Bisang is precise.
“My private sector experience,” she says, “and the relentless focus we have on client needs.”
For an institution moving into a new strategic period, it is a clarifying ambition: the discipline and client orientation of the asset management world brought to bear on the patient, public-minded work of development finance.
SIFEM stands on strong foundations that Jörg Frieden helped build. He took the chair when the institution was smaller and less defined, and he leaves it larger, better governed and clearer about the impact it seeks. He did so with conviction, foresight and an unfailing eye on the people at the far end of every investment. We thank him warmly and wish him well in whatever he turns to next.
We warmly welcome Mirjam Staub-Bisang as she assumes leadership of SIFEM at a demanding time for the development finance community. From her early engagement, it is clear that she brings both vision and determination to the role. We are confident that under her leadership SIFEM will continue to sharpen its strategic focus, deepen its ambition and strengthen its impact for the people and businesses it was created to support.
A Call to Action: Scaling Europe’s Development Finance
A Call to Action: Scaling Europe’s Development Finance
