How to overcome fear in financing climate innovation

Join former CEO of HSBC and ex-UNDP leader as they reveal how financial institutions can become powerful catalysts for climate innovation – and how to turn ambition into impact.

Key takeaways:

Building sustainability strategies prompts leaders to acknowledge and address the fear of change within their organizations, supporting staff through education and clear communication.
Effective climate action depends on enabling policy environments that send strong demand signals to industry, helping scale up new technologies faster and more efficiently.

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For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.

Disclaimer:

This podcast contains information in summary form and is therefore intended for general guidance only. It is not intended to be a substitute for detailed research or the exercise of professional judgment. Member firms of the global EY organization cannot accept responsibility for loss to any person relying on this podcast. The views of third parties set out in this publication are not necessarily the views of the global EY organization or its member firms. Moreover, they should be seen in the context of the time they were made.

Matthew Bell

Hello and welcome to the EY Sustainability Matters podcast, a regular look at the sustainability topics reshaping the world around us and how they impact businesses around the globe. I'm Matt Bell, Global EY Climate Change and Sustainability Services Leader but I'm not actually the host for this episode. This episode is presented by the EY New Economy Research Unit, led by Nadia Woodhouse. Nadia, over to you.

Nadia Woodhouse

Hello, I'm Nadia Woodhouse, and I'm delighted to welcome you to a special episode from EY’s New Economy Unit.

So, what exactly is the New Economy Unit?

We're a dedicated research team within EY’s Global Climate Change and Sustainability Services practice.

Our mission is to champion the deep systemic changes needed for a truly regenerative economy, one where the wellbeing of both people and planet are inseparably connected.

We are cautiously optimistic. The transition to this new economy is within reach, if we act quickly and decisively.

Through our research and reports, we've provided foundations for businesses and society to engage meaningfully with the new economy.

We spotlight innovative businesses and compelling case studies that demonstrate progress toward regenerative models of doing business.

But still, the reality remains.

At present, no organization can claim to be entirely sustainable.

We stand at a crucial crossroads, caught between the challenges of an extractive, crisis-ridden economic paradigm, what we term the polycrisis, and the promise of a regenerative future.

Moving forward demands bold leadership from all sectors, especially the business community.

And the time to act is now.

In this episode, we're joined by two remarkable leaders, Sir Noel Quinn, former Chief Executive of HSBC, and Usha Rao-Monari, previously Under-Secretary General of the United Nations Development Programme and a member of our New Economy Unit Advisory Council.

Both bring extensive board experience across financial services, development and industry.

Together, they serve as independent directors on the board of Fortescue, a global technology, energy and metals group at the forefront of accelerating decarbonization.

So, let's dive in.

Welcome, Usha and Noel.

Usha Rao-Monari

Thank you, Nadia. Noel, it's a pleasure to be able to have this conversation with you on this important issue of sustainability.

Nadia alluded to regenerative economies and the need for a more sustainable future. And I personally think it is the only way to be, and it is the only way to create a better future for ourselves.

So, with your permission, I'd like to examine this and talk about this from two angles.

One, how does a corporate put in place a sustainability strategy, and an action plan actually, that will allow it to graduate to a point where it is resilient and sustainable tomorrow?

And two, how does then that scale into a much more global effort?

What are the challenges of making it a global effort?

I find that we're just not at the point where there are credible pathways and many corporates are wondering how to do it.

They want to do it, they don't know how to do it.

And I'm going to take advantage of your previous role as head of a very large financial institution.

So my first question to you is how did you and what did you do and what were the challenges that you faced in putting in place a sustainability strategy at HSBC?

Noel Quinn

Well, the first thing I did was analysis, to be perfectly honest. This was not me waking up one morning and having a passion or a moralistic view that we had to adopt a sustainability strategy.

My entry point to this was analysis.

The first piece of analysis was do I accept there is a climate problem?

The answer to that was a resounding yes.

Any piece of information I saw convinced me that there genuinely is a climate problem, and that climate problem is closely linked to the way the industrial landscape of today's world has been built up over the past 50,000 years.

So, that wasn't a huge amount of time and effort to get to that conclusion, but you have to get to that conclusion because you have to have conviction.

The second piece of analysis is what should the role of a commercial bank be in solving that problem statement?

And the way I looked at it, we have been an institution that had financed the industrial landscape of the world for the previous 150-plus years, when I started on this journey. Pretty much every industrial sector of the world, we've had a hand in financing it.

We have financed the entrepreneurs of the world for over 150 years. And my belief was if we were going to solve the problem of climate change, every industrial sector in the economy had to go through some form of transition, changing its technology base, the way it provides services and products to its consumers.

And that is the role of a commercial bank, to help businesses transition their business model with capital investment facilitation from one industrial, from one technology base to another.

I saw that as a huge opportunity, as a growth opportunity for banking.

So, I entered this debate with a commercial business case, not just a moralistic imperative.

Rao-Monari

So, let me stop you there before you tell me how you did it.

Many companies that I have spoken to don't consider it an opportunity.

They just consider it a cost.

I've spoken to CFOs who say this is just a cost, why should I do it?

I don't see anything in it for me.

So how did you look at this?

Quinn

Well, I look at it from the point of view of our fundamental core purposes in institutions to help entrepreneurs develop their business.

That's what we've been doing.

And therefore, and I believe that those entrepreneurs, from the ones I was talking to, the businesses, felt that they needed to change their business as well.

And our job is to partner with them.

Our job is to help them with financing, with lending support to make the investments they, so I saw it as an opportunity; because I saw it as an opportunity to lend and help customers prepare themselves for the next 20, 30, 40 years the way we've helped them for the previous 20, 30, 40 years.

There was no, no debate.

Now was there a cost in doing that?

Yes.

And that's where we come to the execution plan. Because the biggest challenge for an institution like ours is familiarity with the past and unfamiliarity with the future.

We're bankers, we're not scientists, we're not engineers, we're not technicians.

We're very familiar in financing the old industry, the old manufacturing bases, the old oil and gas sector, the coal sector, the transportation sector, the airline sector.

We've seen the business cases many, many times.

We understand the cash flows.

We understand the technology.

We are able to do risk assessment of past industries.

Now when you start looking at new technologies, the innovation that's taking place, bankers won't be familiar with those technologies.

They need to be educated.

They won't be familiar with the cash flows associated with it.

They won't, there'll be a fear factor about learning about the new technologies that are going to shape tomorrow's economy.

We had to help them.

How do we go about doing that?

First of all, we communicated very clearly what the strategy was and why we were doing it. And the reason we were doing it was a commercial reason, not just a moral purpose.

Second, we had to recruit in experts.

We had to bring in people who understood those technologies that our customers will be talking to us about. And put those subject-matter experts, make them available to the frontline bankers to understand how they should look at the business cases when they come from our clients.

Rao-Monari

So, you brought the expertise in.

Quinn

We brought scientists in.

We brought people who were familiar with hydrogen.

We had a hydrogen expert join the business.

We had scientists bring, come into the business who understand the technology of the future, not just the technology of the past.

Third, huge amount of training and education for all of our frontline bankers.

They had to be reeducated on what it is they need to look for in the new business cases that would be coming across their table.

And the hardest bit was overcoming fear.

Now that's, that starts with me when I was CEO, but I'm not a scientist, I'm not an engineer. I'm a finance person and an accountant.

So, when somebody talks to me about some new technology, I've got to overcome my own fear, my own lack of understanding of that new technology.

And then if I've got to do it, so too is every other banker in that organization. Plus signing up and putting out into the public domain sustainability targets, when actually you don't have all the answers to how you're going to achieve the targets.

That's tough for any management team, for any CEO or for any board – to commit to a strategy where you honestly do not have all the answers to how you're going to execute that strategy, is not a comfortable feeling for any board or any management team.

And the way I look at it, in the old days, you do all the analysis, you work out your road map and you publish a strategy, and you publish a target.

What a lot of companies are having to do now is publish a commitment to work on implementing a sustainability strategy knowing they do not have all of the technological answers.

They do not have all of the public policy answers that you would like to go alongside it.

Will governments facilitate, won't they facilitate through policy, the implementation and scale-up of those new technologies?

You don't have all those answers. And to put public commitments out there as a listed company without having all the answers is a difficult thing to do. And it's equally difficult for your team to commit to driving and implementing a strategy where they are fearful of their own knowledge or lack of knowledge.

And can they really make this become a reality?

Rao-Monari

Thanks, Noel.

Look, you raise a really interesting issue.

Yes, it has to start from the top.

The leader must be convinced.

But how is the leader convinced?

How does the leader get beyond fear?

Who has his or her back?

I've seen too many instances of boards and shareholders not supporting their CEOs and the CEOs having to walk back.

So what have, what did you do in your HSBC role to feel safe?

Quinn

The fundamental thing you fall back on is an economic case.

Like any business, there has to be an economic case.

It can't just be a print case on principle.

You have to have enough of the execution plan in your mind on how you're going to start the implementation of this, even though you may not have all of the end game fully mapped out, because there are so many evolving parts across the world and across the industry, but you have to make an economic case.

That's your fallback position.

I think the other thing is you just got to be honest with everybody. Be honest with your shareholders.

And frankly, this was an important topic for all of the shareholder meetings I had and investor meetings I had.

What is your game plan to make the business sustainable for the long term?

How are you going to help your customers achieve their goals?

That was on their minds, not just on my mind.

I think it's on the minds of the regulators.

You have to have an answer to this question.

Everyone accepts the fact there is a climate problem.

What if there's a problem?

You need to start to shape an answer to that problem and how that problem is going to impact your organization.

Now, the one thing on mobilizing people. Because there was an economic case, we were able to convince our people to jump on the journey.

Quinn

This was not a mission that was a principle-only based mission.

It was a mission with an economic purpose, and we were able to mobilize because we put economics at the core of it as well and serving clients.

This is about serving your customers and being a leader in the market, not just the follower.
Somehow, it's staying at the level of “I want to be a good guy, I want to show that we're a good company.”

But if you don't put forward that case, the economic case, the profit case, whatever, however you want to calculate it and formulate it, I think it's really, really important to do that.

And so, what I would like to, the last question on, on just your experience with HSBC is when you did that and when you faced opposition from whomever, by the board, your own employees, how did you deal with that?

I mean, was there a plan that you put in place of how to deal with opposition and skepticism?

Quinn

You got to say what you know, and you got to say what you don't know.

Don't pretend.

Don't pretend you got all the answers.

Don't pretend there aren't problems.

Don't pretend there aren't risks.

There are risks.

There's a big risk that you could lend money on new technology and the technology fails.

There's a real economic risk.

There are risks of being sued if you do something, the risks of being litigated against if you don't do something.

You can't just sit on the fence and hope you can satisfy all stakeholders.

You have to have a purpose.

You have to have a core purpose with a core business case that makes sense.

And then you have to be open, transparent on every aspect of that.

And don't try and pretend you have all the answers.

Be transparent.

And you know, HSBC has been very successful under your tenure actually at putting this out to the world.

And so I want to go to my second angle.

Quinn

I just, I just want to clarify, I'm no longer HSBC.

So, I'm talking now as an individual who has faced this as CEO in a large organization. I think the messages I share are relevant to most companies, not just banks, but most companies.

Rao-Monari

Absolutely correct.

Quinn

And this fear of putting a target out there and not having the detailed road map is a real fear.

Rao-Monari

Which is where I'm going to go.

I can think of 25 other companies who are facing this both in the financial sector and nonfinancial sector who are afraid to use your word of putting out goals, standards, disclosure requirements, anything without actually knowing every single detail of it.

So, I think this is an appropriate moment to talk about, let's say, the second angle, which is whatever an entity like HSBC or a large organization like that has done, how do we get to scale that?

Because I can tell you roughly 94% of companies in the world, and I've actually looked at these statistics, want to do this and want to have a plan, want to have the business case, want to have it, but don't know how to put it in place, right?

And so the question I'd like us to discuss and I'll offer you my own little bit of my own observations as well, is what needs to change in the system to achieve these goals of more sustainable companies, more resilient companies and how they interact with the rest of their environment and ecosystem. Somehow, that's not happening.

So, it's a very broad statement, but perhaps you could give me some opening thoughts and we can have a bit of a discussion.

Quinn

Let me, there may be two ways to look at that.

So, from a lessons for other companies on how they make it happen, you know, in your published, in your published information through the report and accounts, if you're a listed company, it's very clear to be, it's very important to be absolutely clear and transparent.

And so, we produced a report that said these are the things we have clear line of sight on, on our transition plan for a particular industry segment.

And for these industry segments, actually there isn't a clear transition plan yet because the technology is still at the early innovation stage and it hasn't yet got to scale.

And to get it to scale may require public policy support, both at a policy level and a financing level.

And that is not yet available.

And therefore, whatever targets you put out there, you make it clear to your stakeholders externally what the dependencies are and what the lack of knowledge is or lack of technology is.

So, you've got to be very transparent in your communication because it is an evolving picture.

If you take it up to the global level, everyone out there says there's plenty of money available to finance the investment necessary to build sustainable infrastructure, sustainable solutions.

Rao-Monari

Economies, yeah.

Quinn

At an aggregate level, the global world, the answer's probably correct.

The challenge is most of the available capital sits in the West and much of the demand for infrastructure investment sits in the emerging markets or developed markets versus emerging markets.

So, there is a mismatch between the supplier capital sitting in the Western developed markets and much of the demand sitting in the emerging markets.

And the flow of capital from developed to developing is not happening at the pace it needs to happen.

There are blockages in that.

One of the biggest blockages, frankly, is information asymmetry.

The capital providers in the developed markets do not know enough about the risk profile, the project definitions, the project availability that exists in the emerging markets.

They're not familiar with the risk profile of many of those emerging markets because they don't have enough people on the ground in those markets.

So, in theory, there's enough capital available to solve the problem.

In reality, there are barriers to moving that capital across border and into the emerging markets and that you are the expert on finding solutions to that.

Rao-Monari

On that though, I totally agree with you.

Part of the problem that I see from where I sat in, in multilateral development banks and so on and so forth and the UN, is not that the Global South, if I may call it that, is unwilling to give information that the, that the Western banks need.

Some of the data just does not exist.

So part of what needs to happen for the future is data has to be found, identified, aggregated and put into a form where the Western financiers can look at it and say, “Oh, I get it, this is the project if you will.

These are the risks, these are the benefits, etc., and money will flow.”

That is an incredibly important thing that needs to happen.

But unfortunately, I don't think that's the only thing that needs to happen – to bring capital to where it's needed.

Because when you look at the need part of it, Noel, in the Global South, it's not just about emissions reductions.

That's a very important part of sustainability.

But it's the whole nature debate that's going on now and nature-based solutions and so on and so forth.

And so, when you look at that space, it becomes even more data-absent and it becomes even more difficult to judge what the risks are and so on and so forth.

So what else do we need, do you think, from your experience?

Quinn

The other problem is even if you got the data, many other financial institutions that have the surplus capital will not have sufficient people on the ground in many other markets that need that capital.

So, even if the information's there, you need people on the ground to understand the local market, understand the risk assessment, have dialogue with the governments, have dialogue with the infrastructure builders.

That exists in the UK, in Europe, in parts of Asia.

There are many markets of the world where those Western capital providers, developed market capital providers don't have sufficient infrastructure on their ground to be able to distribute that fund, those funds.

That's where I think there is collaboration opportunity between the MDBs [multilateral development banks] and the Western capital providers because they do have people on the ground taking those markets.

So, unlocking the information of the MDBs, the multilateral development banks, unlocking their access, market access, leveraging their people on the ground is a way to get developed market capital into projects, into the emerging markets.

Rao-Monari

Very good.

The only other thing I would add to that, yes, all that is true, but MDBs are being asked increasingly to play the role of risk mitigators or risk reducers or whatever, right?

Traditionally, MDBs have been the lenders and the providers of capital, just like the private banks.

Today, for them to change is not impossible, but it's, there's a process, there's a time and there's a transition toward that.

How important do you think this risk mitigation or risk reduction aspect of financial is?

Quinn

Essential. Without risk mitigation, in my view, the transition for the MDB is from being the full provider of finance for a project to actually a targeted risk mitigator, is absolutely the right thing to do.

So you got to look at the risks in a projects.

Sometimes the risk is technology risk.

Well, there's no risk in wind and solar, but can you get wind and solar finance in certain markets, in the emerging markets, not as easily because there are different types of risks.

There's political risk, the risk that a future administration will rip up the contract that was signed 10 years ago.

There's a risk of foreign currency volatility. Outside of an acceptable level of volatility, there are private sector provider of currency hedging would accept. That's where you want targeted risk mitigation.

So, you don't need to mitigate the risk of the technology. You don't need to mitigate the risk, an MDB doesn't need to mitigate the risk necessarily of the development phase of the projects.

Private sector can get their head around that, but they can't price for political risk and they can't price for currency risk.

And that's where a lot of work has been done by the likes of the World Bank and others, to give targeted risk mitigation as opposed to total financing packages.

And really what we should be doing is trying to find ways that the private sector equity and debt markets can supplement the balance sheet of the MDBs and the private sector does what it can do.

And the MDBs offer a level of risk mitigation on a targeted basis.

Rao-Monari

I totally agree.

And that brings me to yet another component that for me is missing from this ecosystem that we're talking about.

So you've got MDBs, you've got the private actors.

What do you think about bringing in the governments themselves, the public policymakers, they have to lean in, don't you think? I mean.

Quinn

So, one of the biggest things is public policy, not just public financing – policy.

Classic example is sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).

We all think it can mitigate circa 80% of the carbon footprints of the airline sector.

Rao-Monari

So they say.

Quinn

But, it's voluntary in many markets.

Increasingly, governments of the world are mandating in regulation that the fuel mix must increase SAF to traditional kerosene.

That is an important demand signal.

That's a policy, and in fact it doesn't cost the government any money.

It's a policy framework that sends a demand signal for the industry.

More of those public policy statements need to be embodied for other industry transition pathways to be successful.

In some cases, they also need a level of public finance support, and very often that would take the form of a price support mechanism.

In the early days of scale-up, scaling a sustainable aviation fuel plant will be on economic, the output will be on economic probably for the first five to 10 years.

A level of public finance support in the form of a contract for difference or some other price support mechanism may be required.

It will taper off over time as the economies of scale kick in.

Now, it's up 30 years for wind and solar to get economies of scale.

We haven't got 30 years to wait.

So my strong view, government should be targeting their policy and their financial support to shorten the scale-up phase of projects, the innovations taking place in the private sector.

But the scale-up needs to be 10 years, not 20 or 30 years.

And that's where public policy and public policy and public finance should be targeted in my view.

Rao-Monari

I couldn't agree more.

And, I think, whenever people talk about public policy, it always comes back to me.

Oh, you want this to be a government state?

No, that's not what we're; we're talking about an enabling policy and regulatory environment that gives, I loved your, your, the label, that gives the correct demand signals and the, the signals to the private actors to act right.

But you also touched upon something else.

And then maybe it's the final piece of this ecosystem, which I'm just calling blended finance.

Ok, now blended finance 101 so far has been very simply, what you said, public finance of some sort, private finance of some sort and magically they had to work.

Well, it hasn't worked as well as we would have liked it to work and these global common spaces that we were talking about and sustainability as a concept hasn't benefited quite simply.

So, how about if we look at blended finance and call it 2.0 and look at it a little bit like you were saying? How about if we look at it not in terms of type of finance, but in terms of types of instruments?

So imagine a world where we have a financial instrument, whatever it is: loan, equity; we have a policy instrument like your contract for difference or anything else that you were talking about.

And probably today in the world of vulnerability that we live in now, probably need a third instrument, which is a social instrument.

And we'd have to have all three instruments structured ex ante into any financial and project structure for it to work.

Do you, I mean, would that unlock anything?

Quinn

Yeah.
So, I've sort of pushed back against the terminology of blended finance because it implies there's one solution.

There isn't one solution.

Blended finance should be tailored.

In my ideal scenario, when I've looked at blended finance, there are instruments up on the shelf.

Rao-Monari

Yep, exactly.

Quinn

And for this type of project in this country, you pull down two or three of the instruments.

For this project in a different country, you only pull down one of the instruments.

Let's say, it's a foreign currency exposure.

So, the way I've looked at it is there needs to be risk mitigating or financing solutions up on the shelf.

And then for different types of projects with different technology maturity in different markets -emerging versus developed, you pull down different components of the contract architecture that then formed that definition of blended finance for that project in that geography.

And that is what I think we're all aiming to try and achieve. And to standardize those product solutions so that then you can get access to the secondary market because you can then parcel up the loans with standard architecture and tractional architecture into diversified portfolios and sell them into the secondary markets, either through securitization or some other form. That will then speed up the deployment of Western capital into emerging market demands.

Rao-Monari

Couldn't agree more. That hasn't happened.

Quinn

And therefore there is no one single definition of blended finance.

Rao-Monari

And I don't even, if I may, I don't think, I think blended finance is an overused term.

We've got to come up with a different probably term.

For me, it's about types of instrument, exactly what you said.

You've got financial instruments, you've got maybe policy instruments, you've got social, let's assume, and you use them the way you need them for each opportunity. That’s totally correct.

It has not happened and it hasn't happened perhaps because first, people are not thinking this way. But second, I've always been faced when I was in MDBs about who's taking the risk, how is the risk allocated, how is the risk shared?

And I don't think it's something we've, everybody talks about it.

Nobody really understands that you're a banker, right?

And if you worked with a World Bank or anybody else, what you already mentioned, you will take certain risks and you would expect someone else to take other risks, including the government, correct?

I mean, how would you?

And, and where there's residual risk, you would want some sort of cover for it.

But I don't think we're thinking or no cover.

I mean, you just deal with the risks.

Quinn

I think it's getting, we're getting closer to potential systemic solutions that can move at pace.

I mean, the trick on this whole topic is; I'm an optimist.

I optimistically believe that the innovation that's taking place in the, in the entrepreneurial community, in research and development institutions is giving us the solutions to the climate problem for industry.

I really believe it.

The real problem is getting that innovation to scale fast.

And particularly the real, real problem is getting that innovation to scale in markets with high-risk profiles, emerging markets.

Now scale and pace is what will mean we succeed, not the innovation.

The innovation is there.

We have to get implementation at scale, at pace.

Therefore, you've got to standardize as much as you possibly can and you've got to try and implement scale.

Now, the one market that is moving at scale at pace is China.

Rao-Monari

It is, it is.

Quinn

They are going down the cost curve on much of that innovation at a faster pace than many other markets.

Rao-Monari

Agreed.

Quinn

Getting down that cost curve to get unit efficiency into your cost of new innovation is absolutely an imperative.

So, if you look at the pace of rollout of wind and solar across China, that is going at a pace that is breathtaking. EV penetration, in the electric vehicle sector, breathtaking.

That changes scale economies overnight.

Rao-Monari

And strangely, this has happened in the past for regular infrastructure.

So here I'm, for example, thinking about the roads highway sector in India, where public money was used to scale as quickly as it can and then tapered off when people understood the risks and so on, or the feed in tariff or the contract for difference that you were talking about in renewable energy.

And we're doing very, very well.

I think what we need now is I like very much your notion of standardization.

It's a tough notion, Noel, ok. When you say standard standardization, people think they don't have choices and that it's some sort of ruling.

No, it's just simplicity.

It's making the problem simpler to understand so that people can follow it through standardization and so on and so forth.

And I think the question I guess here is if you were a corporate, a large corporate or small corporate, what would you want from the various stakeholders?

On the one hand, the policymakers, you got them there for you, the other hand, the MDBs or let's say the multilateral sector broadly put.

And then finally your own stakeholders, the stock exchanges, I still think that much more needs to change in the ecosystem, Noel, than you and I have talked about so far that is needed for true scale.

Quinn

My fear, my fear on this topic for a long time has been we actually overregulate too early.

So accounting standards, they are too onerous and that stifle the entrepreneurial spirit.

So, getting a balance on regulation versus pace of development is important.

there was a publication in Europe last year that suggested there was something like 2,000 metrics that would have to be reported upon by any company investing in sustainable infrastructure.

Quinn

That's just, that's a turn off for any entrepreneur.

And they'll say, well, I don't have that in market X or market Y.

Now, I saw the other day that they're tapering that back and they're probably going to remove circa 60% of those metrics, but it's still 40%.

That’s still, that’s still, you know, yeah, nearly certainly I think it was close on 2,000 in the original list; that’s still a lot.

So, I think, to facilitate the scale-up and implementation of innovation, we can't stifle it through overregulation.

Rao-Monari

I totally agree.

I think, you know, we should actually draw this conversation to close.

But you know, the way I'm looking at what you've said is you need the data and the information symmetry to get things moving.

I'm talking about getting to scale.

You need an enabling policy environment, and you need an enabling, how do I put it, financial bundle, if you will, policy, finance and whatever else in a reasonably simple way to get finance moving and to get scale on the innovations needed to get to that better future.

Do you agree?

Am I missing something?

Quinn

No, that's fine. At a global level, I agree with all of that.

At a corporate level, you have to bring your people with you.

You have to have an economic case.

You have to have a core sense of purpose of why this is important to the 100 people that may be in your organization or the 100,000 people.

It doesn't matter.

But you have to give them a sense of purpose of why they want to do this and be involved in it.

And you've got to help them.

you've got to understand their fear of change because they've been doing it one way for decades or for many, many years.

And you got to help them transition to a new way of working and buy them into the business case.

Look, I'm, I'm an optimist.

I believe there is a major problem, but I also believe there are major solutions that are going to be breakthroughs over the coming years.

And we shouldn't lose, we shouldn't lose sight of the cause.

Rao-Monari

Couldn't agree more.

I am also an optimist, and I do believe that our better future truly does lie ahead of us, as long as we make the right choices.

And this is what we discussed today.

So thank you, Noel.

Quinn

This was a wonderful discussion.

Rao-Monari

Thank you very much.

Bell

So, thanks everybody for listening.

This has been EY Sustainability Matters podcast.

You can find all past episodes of the show on ey.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Ratings, reviews, and of course, comments are all very welcome.

Please also visit ey.com, where you'll find a wide range of related and interesting articles that will help put these bigger topics in the context of your business priorities.

I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode of Sustainability Matters.

Thanks for listening.

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EY Global

Multidisciplinary professional services organization

Podcast

Season 7, Episode 2

Duration

35m 13s

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EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.

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EY Global

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