GFMA Releases Sustainable Finance Survey Report

Washington, DC, 27 June 2019 – The Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA) today published its Sustainable Finance Survey Report which demonstrates how global financial institutions are addressing environmental, social and governance considerations, including the management of physical and transitional climate risks, for themselves and their clients.

The report covers five areas:

• Defining sustainable finance
• Outlining the role of sustainable finance in strategic planning, corporate structure and governance
• Ways in which global financial institutions are incorporating sustainable finance products and services across their business lines
• Climate-related risk management and disclosures
• The role of policymakers

The survey’s respondents identified areas for further policy exploration, which include:

• Streamlining and ensuring consistency of definitions across all regions
• Preserving firms’ flexibility to develop internal taxonomies based on an individual risk governance, client footprint, and regional and sectoral drivers
• Balancing the need to improve data quality, transparency and comparability with the need to
  foster innovation in a still-developing space
• Mitigating risks of greenwashing and developing appropriate verification practices
• Reviewing potential unintended consequences of Basel III to align the new framework with the
  actual risks of sustainable assets, and the major policy objective of enabling financial institutions
  to scale up their balance-sheet allocation to sustainable finance projects
• Building awareness for all capital market participants, clients and investors to promote the issuance of sustainable products and capacity building.

The survey, conducted in May and June of 2019, is based on the anonymized and aggregated responses of 22 of the largest globally active financial and capital market participants. The findings of this survey will be helpful to global financial institutions to benchmark against their peers and also to help inform future policymaking.

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The Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA) brings together three of the world’s leading financial trade associations to address the increasingly important global regulatory agenda and to promote coordinated advocacy efforts. The Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) in London and Brussels, the Asia Securities Industry & Financial Markets Association (ASIFMA) in Hong Kong and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) in New York and Washington are, respectively, the European, Asian and North American members of GFMA. For more information, visit http://www.gfma.org.

GFMA Media Contacts:
Evan Grogan               +1 (212) 313-1134                  egrogan@sifma.org
Rebecca Hansford      +44 (0)20 3828 2693              rebecca.hansford@afme.eu
Corliss Ruggles          +852 9359 6996                     cruggles@asifma.org