The British lender has taken a leading role in global climate finance efforts.
DAVOS: Standard Chartered is set to book almost US$1bil in income this year from business geared towards helping clients meet sustainability goals, chief executive Bill Winters told executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos, as he doubled down on supporting the net-zero agenda.
The British lender, which has pledged to mobilise US$300bil in green and sustainable financing by 2030, has taken a leading role in global climate finance efforts and will continue to do so despite the election of climate sceptic Donald Trump as US president and amid increasing pressure on banks, Winters said.
“It’s a big business for us,” he said. “A couple of years ago we gave the guidance externally we’d make a billion US dollars of income by 2026 and we’ll be pretty close to that in 2025.
“It’s a profitable business, so I don’t want to sound too mercantilist about it, but we do the right thing, and we get paid for it,” he added. “It’s kind of win-win.”
Winters acknowledged negative sentiment around environmental, social and governance standards in the United States added pressure to companies and businesses, but said banks and large oil-producing countries elsewhere had yet to reverse broad support for the transition to a net-zero economy.
“In the long run, it is pretty clear we need to disgorge ourselves from fossil fuels,” he said.
Efforts to foster climate action in the financial industry have been hampered in recent weeks after United States and Canadian banks left a United Nations-backed banking alliance amid Republican pressure.
Standard Chartered remains a member of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a spokesperson for the lender said on Monday, but is continuing to “monitor evolving dynamics closely”.
Winters’ comments came hours after Trump took office, declaring an energy emergency and committing to boost US oil and gas production as he initiated a series of roll-backs on green policies put in place by the previous administration.
Regardless of politics, favourable economics drove a clean energy boom during Trump’s first term, with Republican stronghold Texas leading record-high US solar and wind energy expansion in 2020, US government data show.
Yesterday, Winters told a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum that global trade flows would suffer from “interesting ructions” as the new Trump administration settles in.
“We’ll see what comes through in terms of tariffs, but we know China is a big part of that in terms of having a gigantic export surplus, and that will be under attack from all parts of the world,” Winters said. — Reuters
