A ‘sustainable’ view of sustainability in finance

In years of old, people thought you were being sustainable because you turned off your screens at night and didn’t print in colour.

We know now that ethical sustainability goes beyond that. It’s not just about your carbon footprint, but looking at your full-service chain, ensuring all those you interact with and contract with, are equally if not better in their sustainability. Are you lending to and borrowing from sustainable companies? What’s the provenance of your products? These questions make the issue of ethic sustainability in financial intuitions more interesting and crucial.

People want their financial services providers to have a ‘clean’ record, which has been damaging to many companies.

But, this is clearly an opportunity for innovation. FS institutions are able to use customers’ altruistic change of heart as a means to differentiate.

We get deeper into the sustainability opportunities for banks in a recent episode of the podcast ‘Don’t Break the Bank’. Nicola Acutt, VMware’s Vice President for Sustainability Strategy, speaks compellingly about how banks’ quest for sustainability relates to innovation and, of course, resilience. Check it out here: [https://blogs.vmware.com/emea/en/2020/07/dont-break-the-bank-the-next-frontier-in-innovation-the-sustainability-opportunity-for-banks/]