Whitepaper
Turning strategy into reality:
ESG implementation challenges in Australia’s finance sector
This report, written by The Action Exchange and featuring exclusive interviews with sustainability leaders, offers senior finance industry executives actionable insights on workforce and skills, integrating ESG into commercial decision-making, and looming governance challenges.
Most banking and finance sector Chief Sustainability Officers have spent the past five years grappling with how to develop and mature an organisation-wide sustainability strategy, and the senior leadership support it requires. Yet as the focus shifts from strategy to execution, the emerging challenges are proving to be an altogether different beast.
It requires transforming entire organisations’ financial services executives and staff—whether front or back office— into sustainability practitioners. Lending and investment managers face a particularly tricky transition as they integrate ESG considerations into more traditional commercial decisions and the focus turns from banks’ own sustainability performance to their financed emissions.
As responsibility for implementing an ESG strategy becomes more diffuse, banks and financial institutions also face a new set of governance challenges. Those that get the shift wrong risk not just alienating customers and staff, but attracting the wrath of regulators too.
This report examines:
01
How banks and financial institutions are building and acquiring the skills needed to execute their sustainability strategy.
02
The unique governance challenges arising as responsibility for sustainability becomes diffused across banks and financial institutions.
03
How banks and financial institutions are supporting lending and investment managers to embed ESG into commercial decision-making—and whether front office staff are being effectively held to account for achieving their organisation’s sustainability goals.
Featuring expert interviews with:
Kate Bromley, executive director of sustainable finance, Fair Supply
Michael Chen, executive director and head of ESG, Westpac Institutional Bank
Ivor Gibbons, head of sustainability, Perpetual Limited
Kristy Graham, chief executive officer, Australian Sustainable Finance Institute
Darian Mc Bain, chief executive officer, Outsourced Chief Sustainability Officer Asia; visiting professor in practice, London School of Economics and Political Science
Fiona Reynolds, chair, UN Global Compact Network Australia
Sema Whittle, general manager, corporate governance and sustainability, Allianz Australia
