5min chapter

Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together cover image

The Green Finance Podcast Ep. 8: On technology enabling sustainable banking, with Temenos

Tearsheet Podcast: Exploring Financial Services Together

CHAPTER

Are Banks, Fintechs, or Financial Institutions Sustainable Organizations?

Banks are in a unique position to influence the transition to a low carbon economy. They can do that by reducing the impact of their own operations as well as the emissions they finance. Using AI in asset and wealth management as the basis for impact investing, this allows banks to measure the non-financial impact of their portfolios. The bank runs on the TEMENOS banking cloud powered by Microsoft Azure and it actually was able to generate up to 96% less emissions compared to on-premise alternatives.

00:00
Speaker 2
I want to get your overall view of the whole picture that we're in right now. So do you think currently banks, Fintechs, or financial institutions are sustainable organizations? And if you think not, how can they become sustainable organizations?
Speaker 1
Thank you, it's a really good question because right now ESG or sustainability or CSR has come to the top of many, many companies and the top of the banks agendas at this point. So there's a lot of banks and I'm talking about banks because these are our clients and we know them really well. So banks are committing to ESG targets and they're setting net zero plans. They need to have ESG considerations within their operation products. So this is a very hot topic and climate change that we see and we view it globally with the energy issues happening around the globe at this point is currently a major challenge. But it creates both threats and opportunities and it has a significant impact on the economy and the banking sector. So I would say that, yes, some companies and some banks might be ready, but some of them they need to do some more in order to reach the, you know, to become truly sustainable organizations. It's still evolving, but I believe that banks are in a unique position to influence the transition to a low carbon economy and they can do that by reducing the impact of their own operations as well as the emissions they finance. So we all understand how this pressure, you know, will get pushed down to the suppliers of the banks and we as a supplier of the banking industry understand the implications of climate change and have the know how to help them transition to low carbon economy. What I would mention is that first the banks from what we see need to measure and reduce the direct impact of their own operations as they have net zero plants in place or they put net zero plants in place. So they, we see that all these years they have been naming to digitally transform and this is mainly driven by financial and compliance pressures and competition and customer demand. But by moving the technology infrastructure to the cloud, this has enabled banks to answer these challenges, but at the same time cloud is also helping banks address other key challenges like the net zero race. So compared with legacy IT infrastructure, the cloud is a low carbon technology due to the benefits that it actually offers at the end of the day, optimization of application development and performance as well as significant efficiency gain from hyperscaler data centers. So what we see is that SaaS and cloud and this is not something that we are saying, the leading hyperscalers are saying that the estimate that they can SaaS and cloud can reduce energy and emissions by over 95% compared to legacy IT infrastructure. So banks need to reduce their measure and reduce their indirect also the indirect impact of their own operations or the emissions they finance, which is a bit more challenging. So using AI in asset and wealth management as the basis for impact investing, this allows banks to measure the non-financial impact of their portfolios and choose the options that fit best with their investment strategy and values. So what we see here is that in order for banks and financial institutions to become a truly sustainable organization, they need to embrace cloud and SaaS technology and at the same time they need to be able to use the technology and especially AI in order to be able to get into fields like sustainable investing. And this is something that we see through our clients and we have a really good example and this is what we presented on our flagship event a couple of months ago, the TEMENOS Community Forum, where together with Microsoft and the Flowee Bank, which is a cloud enabled digital bank in Italy, this is part of the Mediolanum Group. And we showed that how a bank can actually achieve the triple bottom line, which is planet, people, planet and profit at the end of the day. So the bank runs on the TEMENOS banking cloud powered by Microsoft Azure and it actually was able to generate up to 96% less emissions compared to on-premise alternatives. So at the end of the day, yes, there is hope and yes, there is a way how technology can actually help financial institutions and banks move and to sustainability and move to become a sustainable and inclusive organizations.

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