How might we empower MNC corporates/large SMEs to discover potential ESG advisory and capital needs to facilitate the journey for a (socially) just transition towards a low carbon economy?

Background

• DBS needs a digital lead generation/engagement model to originate green financing opportunities. Currently, the bank’s relationship managers (RM) do not have a tool to meaningfully engage with their SME clients when it comes to ESG topics. This limits the RM’s understanding of where their clients are in their sustainability journey. DBS also needs a solution that could enable them to perform green KYC (know your customer) effectively. The bank wants to enable their client’s decarbonisation journey and to develop a net zero roadmap based on the client’s disclosed data.

Potential Ideas/Solutions

• Potential solutions that DBS is considering include having artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models to identify repeatable industry-specific sustainable patterns, equipping DBS’ RMs with ESG insights and information such as climate-risk scenario analysis to allow them to meaningfully engage with their clients on ESG matters, tools that are able to embed social factors to help clients visualize the transition finance journey, social impact measurement/framework to measure trade offs from actions taken as well as an automated repository system for client’s ESG disclosure and declaration.

Benefits

• RMs are better equipped to meaningfully engage with their clients with value adding recommendations, therefore leading to more conducive relationships. These solutions also unlock greater opportunities to discover potential ESG advisory and capital needs, thus allowing the bank to offer more green financing to their customers.

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How might we support carbon intensive/hard-to-abate clients to frame an achievable, science-based transition pathway and assess against codified taxonomies?

Background

• Across the focus sectors of energy, agriculture, building and construction, cement, and maritime, HSBC is facing challenges with client data collection to support their transition plans. Data sources are largely qualitative, with a lack of quantitative data. Additionally, sustainability performance targets are extremely bespoke, depending on client profiles. Monitoring of sustainability performance dynamically is also a challenge, with disclosures based on annually submitted reports.

Potential Ideas/Solutions

• Potential solutions that HSBC is considering include using data to recommend sustainability impact, and generate repeatable (industry) patterns that clients can seamlessly adopt to achieve net zero transition roadmap on a transaction by transaction basis, content and usable portal to educate on client’s own transition pathway and enable clients to make decision arounds their own transition journey, extracting relevant information from sustainability report to pre-fill the ‘template’ to have more pointed conversation on transition finance with clients, among others.

Benefits

• Allows the bank to make preemptive measures based on their clients’ sustainability, easier monitoring of their clients’ sustainability performance and greater ease of relevant ESG data collection.

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How might we enable cross-sector clients to gain access to and report quality, consistent ESG data, in order for banks to actively manage their financed emissions and design credible transition finance solutions?

Background

• Banks and investors are increasingly making net zero commitments, driving a sector-wide push towards transition and sustainable financing. For OCBC Bank to achieve this commitment and enable its clients onto the same path to net zero, the bank needs to focus on active monitoring and management of its financed emissions. This challenge will require access to quality, consistent, and verified emission data from their clients. OCBC Bank is looking for innovative solutions that have the capabilities to enable the creation of a sector-encompassing data dictionary, a user-friendly sector-agnostic disclosure platform, and an emissions calculator that is aligned with the current framework of emissions calculation.

Potential Ideas/Solutions

• Potential ideas that OCBC Bank is considering include developing a disclosures platform that is able to measure and monitor the financed emissions of all financial products, for the bank to onboard its clients through a consolidated green financing omni-channel approach. This will enable their transition to net zero as well as acquire direct access to energy consumption data from utility providers to indirectly measure scope 2 emissions with ease.

Benefit

• Enable the bank to create a financial product agnostic emissions disclosures and calculation platform.

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How might we empower & incentivise MNC clients to standardize their ESG data and to decarbonise in order for them to reach their Net Zero commitments?

Background

• Multinational Corporations (MNC) have made net zero commitments but do not have the means to collect and estimate their suppliers’ emissions (except via manual questionnaires). The reported supplier emissions data is highly inconsistent in approach with respect to emissions data tracking and reporting. There is also an absence of a structured and automated way in the collection of utility level data (outside of reported questionnaires). Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) is looking for a scalable solution that is able to pool standardized and validated ESG data from MNCs and other data sources so as to reduce their operations’ workload. The bank is also seeking a solution that can empower and incentivise SCB’s MNC clients with the right tools and knowledge to track their emissions data reliably in a structured and automated manner.

Potential Ideas/Solutions

• Potential solutions that SCB is considering include automated solutions to derive validated data from public sources to complement SCB’s internal data collection process, as well as a centralized digital data collection tool that would allow MNCs to input all of their ESG data in a single repository, among others.

Benefits

• Allow the bank to have a simplified process for MNC clients to track and report their emissions, reducing workload for both the bank and their MNC clients. Furthermore, ESG data can also be collected faster and more reliably.

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How might we upskill leaders to equip them with the capabilities to implement and adopt green practices?
How might we enable our clients across the supply chain to transform to reduce their carbon footprint through their company culture?

Background

• For TDCX, the key challenge is that data is not organized and structured to align to the prevailing ESG frameworks and materiality assessments. The lack of an organized data structure leads to the failure in achieving the company’s decarbonisation efforts. This in turn leads to reliance on carbon services, specifically carbon offsets projects. There is a need to transform both the company’s and the client’s organizational culture in order to incentivise ESG-learning practices.

Potential Ideas/Solutions

• Potential solutions that TDCX is considering include organizational culture training and enablement towards sustainability​, data dashboards to influence change in leadership’s decision making towards sustainability ​as well as having an impact analysis tool aligned to recent ESG frameworks, among others.

Benefits

• Equip TDCX and its clients with the requisite skills and readiness to measure social impact, and set ESG goals​ and policies. This also enables them to embed ESG-centric culture across stakeholders to facilitate more greener practices.

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How might we equip our relationship managers to guide SMEs on their sustainability journeys?

Background

• SME clients represent a significant portion of UOB’s lending book. Yet UOB’s relationship managers (RMs) face challenges in guiding their SME clients on their sustainability journey. Hence, UOB is looking to enable its RMs to customize engagements based on its clients’ sustainability familiarity, and propose solutions that will simplify the sustainability journeys of its SME clients following UOB’s sustainable finance frameworks.

Potential Ideas/Solutions

• Potential solutions that UOB is considering include providing the bank’s RMs with an on-demand tool to support their client engagements, and content that can be flexibly tailored based on the knowledge of each SME client. UOB is seeking a digital platform that will enable SMEs to understand and design their own decarbonisation pathways. The bank is also seeking tools to support them in monitoring resource usage in construction as well as in other hard-to-abate sectors; perform supply chain mapping with suppliers’ sustainability profile and benchmarking; and tools to drive materials’ circularity within the sector’s value chain, among others.

Benefits

• Allow SME clients to gain bespoke recommendations to accelerate progress towards their sustainability journeys. In turn, UOB will not only be seen as a trusted advisor, but will also be able to draw interest to the bank’s sustainable finance products among SME clients.

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