background

News

Latest News Thumbnail

Presenting a right sustainability narrative imperative to achieve SDGs: IMC banking conference

WriteCanvas News


The UN’s 17 SDGs address critical issues like access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, and building sustainable cities. Importantly, the SDGs are interconnected. Progress on one goal can support the progress of the other. For example, ensuring access to clean energy (SDG 7) can contribute to reducing poverty (SDG 1) and improving health outcomes (SDG 3). This interconnectedness highlights the need for a balanced approach to social, economic, and environmental sustainability. This was the crux of IMC’s 14th Annual Banking & Finance Conference.

Experts discussed the pivotal role that the banking, non-banking, and financial industries is playing in the government of India’s ambitious financial inclusion drive during a day-long event.

Inaugurating the conference, Himanish Chaudhuri, Partner and Financial Services Industry Leader, Deloitte India, said that India is the poster child of financial inclusion. “We have conquered the complexities of the problem by using technology. We are data-rich. We want to go from being information-rich to being data-rich to reach the insight-rich stage. This will help us to drive last-mile financial inclusion.”

One such panel discussion was on: How Financial Institutions can play a Pivotal Role in Achievement of Sustainable Development Goal

The panel included Manish Kumar, Head of ESG & CSR, ICICI Bank Ltd, Renjini Liza Varghese, CEO, WriteCanvas,  Smitha Hari. President (India), auctus ESG, Heena Khushalani, Partner, Climate Change and Sustainability Services, EY India, Jitesh Shetty, Co-Founder/CEO, Credible ESG. The panel was moderated by  Swati Agrawal, CEO & President – Advisory, CARE Analytics and Advisory Pvt. Ltd.

Some edited excerpts:

Manish Kumar 

​All conventional sources that specify and use green are termed green bonds. Some new instruments, like securitization, have been introduced in the market. In this case, a pool of receivables with sustainability or green as an end-use can be securitized as a source for raising liabilities.

Heena Khushalani

We have witnessed tremendous momentum being created at the awareness level​ of green lending among banks during the past year. Has it progressed? Not really. They’re trying to figure out how to do it while maintaining the economics, which is why it’s not progressing because of everyone’s current predicament or dilemma.

Smitha Hari 

Projects related to the Sustainable Development Goals are seen as having a high risk and low return when looking at the capital stack. ​ For these, the grants or philanthropies come with the lowest rate, followed by government subsidies, equity, and debt. Dfis and MDB Capital can influence the market ​with diverse instruments​ in the form of credit enhancements. ​Instead of directly lending, if they come in with a credit enhancement, that can multiply the market

Renjini Liza Varghese

The absence of a clear narrative, inconsistent delivery, and missing data points present the three main obstacles to effectively communicating with the stakeholders. Filling in the blanks with data is crucial to constructing a consistent story.

Jitesh Shetty

Customers want data to flow in a seamless automated way. But the challenge is from within the bank or the enterprise. They don’t have the right owners of the data. The data not in the right place. But that is changing now with BRSR.

Other panels also touched upon ESG and rising climate risk :

Dr. Srikanta K. Panigrahi, Director General and Distinguished Research Fellow, Indian Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD), New Delhi

These days, risk finance is becoming increasingly popular. Thanks to the RBI’s climate-related financial risk disclosure on the public platform, leading banks like the State Bank of India have developed risk assessment procedures and are hiring climate risk officers in prime branches. The banking sector is empowering the green offshoot.

Rajiv Anand, Deputy Managing Director, Axis Bank Limited

Axis Bank has a board-level ESG committee, with its chair also serving on the credit committee. When it comes to green financing, we view the world through two lenses: our credit lens, which acts as a ban, and our ESG lens.


Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

background

Banking, SBTi

Latest News Thumbnail

4 Global Banks Exit SBTi

WriteCanvas News


Four global banks including HSBC, Standard Chartered, Société Generale, and ABN AMRO have exited the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).

Citing sources, Reuters reported that The banks have abandoned SBTi efforts to validate their goals because of concerns it could hinder their ability to continue financing fossil fuels.

According to media reports, some banks claimed the SBTi requirements would make it more difficult for them to work with and support businesses as they navigated the climate transition, especially those clients in less developed markets who still relied on fossil fuels for their energy needs.

ESG Today wrote that the banks declared their intention to resign before the organization’s planned introduction of a new standard that will evaluate financial institutions’ efforts toward achieving net zero. The standard will have stringent limitations on financing for fossil fuels.

Interestingly, every bank is a signatory to the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), an alliance of banks organized by the UN with the mission of advancing global net zero goals through their financing operations. Members of the NZBA pledge to set 2030 financed emissions targets, initially concentrated on important emissions-intensive sectors, and to transition operational and attributable greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from their lending and investment portfolios to align with net zero pathways by 2050.

According to media reports that cited the SBTi, the organization got hundreds of responses in response to its exposure standard for June 2023. Consequently, it has incorporated draft Fossil Fuel Finance Position Paper criteria into a pilot version of near-term criteria and recommendations for financial institutions. The finalized criteria aim to remove common barriers to adopting science-based targets and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, highlighting the importance of financial intermediaries in decarbonizing the global economy.

2015: SBTi was founded as a collaboration between CDP, WRI, WWF, and UNGC, to establish science-based environmental target setting as a standard corporate practice
2022: SBTi established standards for financial institutions’ net zero goals
June 2023: SBTi released a position paper on fossil fuel financing restrictions


Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function twenty_twenty_one_the_posts_navigation() in /home2/writecxc/public_html/wp-content/themes/twentytwentyone-child/archive.php:31 Stack trace: #0 /home2/writecxc/public_html/wp-includes/template-loader.php(106): include() #1 /home2/writecxc/public_html/wp-blog-header.php(19): require_once('/home2/writecxc...') #2 /home2/writecxc/public_html/index.php(17): require('/home2/writecxc...') #3 {main} thrown in /home2/writecxc/public_html/wp-content/themes/twentytwentyone-child/archive.php on line 31