HSBC approaches sustainable finance on a different canvas to everyone else. All houses can highlight great environmental, social and governance deals by now, but HSBC doesn’t just want to tell you about a green bond or a sustainability financing. It wants to talk about shaping policy with assistance to governments and regulators; about how sustainable finance goes all the way through its banking offering to trade finance and cash management, to sustainability-linked interest rate swaps and recycled PVC credit cards.
Consequently, HSBC takes this award for a fifth time.
Naturally, innovative deals are important: examples in our review period included Bangladesh’s first social principles-aligned loan, Malaysia’s first green trade financing in cocoa sourcing, Australia’s first sustainability-linked loan in the metals and mining industry for South32, India’s first skills impact bond and a social loan for Indonesia’s first national telecommunications public-private purchasing satellite project.
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The South32 deal in particular showed HSBC’s stomach for the fight: the climate battle won’t be won just by financing wind farms and solar, but by taking polluters and bringing them on a gradual journey from brown to green.
Equally