Sustainable lending
At times we face challenging situations when our business decisions have the potential to detrimentally affect communities or the wider environment. It gets more difficult when environmental and social standards in certain markets fall short of international standards.
These situations can present both credit and reputational risks to Standard Chartered. Importantly, they simply do not fit with the values of our organisation.
For example, Standard Chartered was offered the role of arranging project finance for a gas/diesel dual-fired thermal power plant in Pakistan. An independent consultant certified the project would comply with the Equator Principles (EP) only if the customer carried out certain mitigation measures.
The customer subsequently decided not to incur the additional costs involved in meeting the EP because the project already met local environmental regulations and the loan was oversubscribed by local banks. Standard Chartered’s commitment to the EP led to our withdrawal from the transaction.
At times, such challenges provide the Bank with an opportunity to work with clients, helping them to improve the social, environmental and economic outcome of a project. That is because, in the long term, most customers realise that this will benefit them as well.
We understand that such an approach to business needs wide-ranging reforms in the regulatory environment and takes time. We are also aware that we need to build up our internal capacity to achieve sustainable risk management.
Our relationship managers, the Bank’s central point of contact for each client and deal, are trained to implement the Group Environmental and Social Risk Policy, in place now for 10 years. The policy lays down methods to assess the client’s capacity and commitment to manage environmental and social risks, look for patterns of environmental or social breaches (such as labour standards) and encourage clients to follow internationally accepted guidelines, exceeding local regulatory requirements where practicable.
To provide further clarity to our client relationship managers, we are currently developing and implementing a series of position statements that provide social and environmental ‘yardsticks’ on key sustainability issues and for particular commercial sectors.
We have drafted statements setting out our standards on child labour, climate change, dams, forestry and palm oil, fossil-fuelled power generation, gaming and gambling, mining and metals, nuclear power, oil and gas, ship breaking, tobacco and transportation of hazardous materials. The Bank will engage external stakeholders in 2008 for input before finalising and implementing the papers.
A series of practitioner guides will accompany the statements, supported by training of our front-line relationship managers, credit risk officers and portfolio managers. Our lending criteria will apply to Wholesale Banking and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) clients. SME implementation will present a particular challenge, given the relatively limited resources of these entities and that in certain markets the regulations governing SMEs may not be as stringent as the standards set out in our position statements. Where this is the case, the relationship managers will work with the client to determine a pragmatic timeline for compliance, with withdrawal seen only as a last resort.
Finance is a strong field and a department in almost every organization and firm throughout the world. Finance basically means the dealing and matters of money and savings. It has a lot of further branches that works in different disciplines all regarding money and its issues. The strength of a company or organization is known by observing its finance department. Today finance matters to al lot of people who have been in business and are new in the developing field. Internet being a big source of business dealings and daily basis work performance values finance a lot. Finance is an affair in which every small or big person is involved. When it comes on Internet, it directly connects with finance articles. Articles help a lot and works great on finance, the article submission done on the finance subjects are most wanted on Internet. A finance article has either news information, newly offers, changes in rates, exchange updates, selling and buying prices, banking information, loans, payments, and orders and much more or they provide complete knowledge on every topic that is discussed below as an academic purpose. Finance articles are circulated freely and on payment to businessmen and dealers; to whom it may concern.
Students of finance subjects find their articles on each topic to gain more clear knowledge regarding the topic and use them in their reports, where as the money making people get their alerts, newsletters and discuss their points on forums through financial articles. There are a lot of experts present on Internet who are there to solve finance queries and daily problems of the business related people. The experts themselves are quite experienced in the field of finance and they give tricks and tactics to manage customers and deal with the ups and downs that occur in people’s business. Learning finance is now easier through the finance articles; a lot of beginners seek guidance on Internet to get their questions solved related to finance. There are a lot of tools and software’s developed that are used in financial concerns and their information and benefits are discussed in the finance articles.
Many people place letters and their experiences on article, as an article itself is an extract of knowledge that is published for people’s awareness, for reader audience to read whatever makes them interested. Many companies show their financial assets and historic review on financial articles. Banking involved articles as well. Thus in every need finance articles work a lot for the people who are more into Internet. It is very sensitive, as the finance articles are purposed to describe facts and figures of the matter very accurately and this needs sharp brains to secure the knowledge in an article.
