Introduction 

It’s no secret that the financial services have a huge part to play in the UK achieving its climate change goals. During Cop27 the UN Secretary-General specifically called on the financial and technology services to help with the fight against climate change. Back in October, we hosted a round table with C-level execs from the Retail Financial Services. This included Retail Banks, Building Societies and Insurance Companies. We discussed the topic of sustainability in finance and explored some of the challenges these companies were experiencing with either launching new climate-friendly products or implementing more sustainable processes to help hit their climate change goals.

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Findings

Concerns within the group about climate have increased significantly over the past few years, however, 95% of the group agreed that action towards sustainability in their businesses is being hampered by new economic and geopolitical challenges. In particular with the most recent political events. We talked about some of the obstacles to launching new climate-friendly products. 29% of the group voted that their biggest obstacle was the difficulty in measuring environmental impact. Focus on near-term business issues/demand was a close second with 22% of the votes.

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During the session, we also discussed whether suppliers and business partners needed to meet any particular sustainability criteria. It was promising to see that 85% of the group are already reviewing new suppliers' sustainability credentials or are planning to in the near future, which falls within Scope 3 of emission reporting and is hugely important for businesses now that Taxonomy reporting is coming into play next year.

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Summary

There is still plenty to do when it comes to sustainability in finance and big changes won’t happen overnight. There was a feeling in the room that this subject is getting higher on the priority list and that measurable actions need to be made to help drive sustainable outcomes within our businesses. Small steps can be made towards being more sustainable and docStribute can help with that. We are helping businesses reduce their reliance on paper, removing the need to send PDFs (and reducing CO2E in the process) and strengthening their omnichannel approach to non-portal users. Some of the key benefits of our solution are built on savings, both in cost and in CO2E. Whilst an initial investment in technology is required the operational savings that are gained completely outweigh this. 

If you’re interested in discovering more please reach out to us via our contact us page.

Andrew Taylor

Head of Sales

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