This November saw the yearly recurrence of the Singapore Fintech Festival. During the three days, over 62,000 people gathered to see first-hand the exciting developments taking place in the fintech industry, as well as listen to speakers from government bodies, policy makers, and organisations big and small.
Not only were we fortunate to showcase to many interested spectators our G17Eco platform, including SGX ESGenome (our latest release in partnership with the Singapore Stock Exchange). But also our very own Manjula Lee had the privilege of speaking at the Festival twice.
For her first engagement, Manjula was part of a panel which discussed the importance of fintech within the sustainability sector and its global implications. Manjula was joined by:
Helge Muenkel | Chief Sustainability Officer, DBS Bank
Maya Hari | CEO, Terrascope Pte Ltd
Jonathan Larsen | Chief Innovation Officer of Ping An Group, Chairman & CEO ofPing An Global Voyager Fund, Ping An Group
Sang Shin | Director, Digital Innovation, Temasek (moderator)
During the session, Manjula spoke on the power of data to unlock rapid transformation in the way that businesses operate to move towards greater sustainability:
“The topic shouldn't be about climate change and defining the problem but really, it's about causation problem solving. We owe it to ourselves as technologists, fintech or sector solutionists, to say ‘what problem are we trying to solve?’ Climate change is a symptom, it's not a cause. If we go and measure scope one, two, and three today, we can address where we are as a baseline. But what is the cause of climate change? Every IPCC report says climate change is 100% man-made. We have a social responsibility as providers to raise the human consciousness with new data to a new belief system that says it's more prosperous to be sustainable than it is to not be. We have to build this new data set that shows this prosperity and that there is a better way in de-risking your company which means increasing value for it.
“Then if we take that to the economic system: at the moment we have an economic system that doesn't penalise the bad behaviour, nor does it reward the good behaviour and the human condition is about reward. If we have a system that does not reward that good behaviour, it's going to lose everyone. We need a system of rewarding good behaviour and if we can move in that direction, if we heal ourselves, we heal the planet. Our role right now as technologists, as banks, as financiers is to get this ecosystem going. We all have to work together, we all have to be on one interoperable system, we all need to be looking at the same golden source of trusted comparable verified data and then we can build a marketplace.
“Over the last six months this ecosystem, particularly Singapore Inc, has come together: companies big and small, assurers, rating agencies, the stock exchange, the regulators, the banks, the government. Singapore is poised to lead the world to how we're going to do a sustainable future: where we're all working towards a trusted, comparable, verifiable impact data, not just ESG inputs and outputs, but outcomes and impact data. There has never been, up until today, a place where we can have this trusted, comparable, verifiable data source that we can look at and see who's giving me more bang for my buck. This is the importance of this evolution and that's what we're bringing together with G17Eco.
“My prediction is that ESG was the first piece. It served us to this point. The continuum is a theory of change, which is social, economic, and environmental integrated reporting so you can see your business with a SEE (Social, Economic, Environmental) lens. We can't separate the financial and the non-financial anymore. We have to bring it integrated into the DNA of the business, into the operations, into the finance, into the HR, into all the management decisions. My prediction is that we are going to use the SDGs to measure our outcomes and impact against global targets. We have financial accounting at hundreds of years to standardise. We don't have hundreds of years to standardise sustainability reporting. When I say sustainability reporting, I'm not meaning this other thing that you do on the side, I'm talking about integrating this reporting. The role of fintech now is to fast track that integration. If we do not do that, we will end up further backwards than we are today. We need to be purpose-driven organisations that say profitability comes from being sustainable.
“We haven't got long. We've got to work together, and we've got to solve the problem at the cause, not the symptoms. Don't create a solution looking for a problem. Go to the cause, fix that root cause. If we do that together we will have a planner for the next generation. My aim here is to unite everybody we're going to be working with in this ecosystem, producing a continuum of data collection, processing, aggregation, dissemination, and creating that value chain between all of us to have that one trusted golden source of data. It can't be input/output data anymore, it has to be outcomes and impact data otherwise we don't know where to invest, where to divest, where to manage risk, and what is actually working to scale.”
It was a great privilege to get to speak at the Festival and hear some fantastic insights from other members of the fintech sector.
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