Financial Insights: Sustainable Finance

More fines, data touted as solutions to

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Reputational risks abound for those who drag their feet about sustainability or engage in greenwashing.

ASIA PACIFIC

How much of the sustainability initiatives reported by banks are true, and how much are conflated? The reality is it is hard to measure how prevalent greenwashing has become or even just the level of how green a bank has become, experts told Asian Banking & Finance.

“I don’t think anybody really does a reliable analysis of how prevalent greenwashing is. It’s detected anecdotally by incidents,” Eugene Goyne, EY Asia-Pacific Financial Services Regulatory lead, said. “What I would say is, there’s a massive increase in the volume of sustainability disclosures coming from different perspectives.”

With the increasing amount of sustainability-linked financial products and disclosures coming out, it is expected that there will be a level of mistakenly inaccurate or misleading statements, and even an element of deliberate misrepresentation or fraud.