The Future of Sustainability Finance - Thought Leaders Study

In this paper, the author presents a study of fifty thought leaders around the world for their views on the future of corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainable finance by 2015.

The findings of this study support the following trends:

• The business trend of CSR is being mainstreamed within the financial services sector, with banks and asset managers in the lead;
• Leading financial institutions (FIs) are establishing governance and management systems to embed CSR into their operations;
• These institutions will be increasingly reporting on their CSR performance with independent validation;
• In the future, CSR-oriented FIs will have robust stakeholder engagement programs to solve complex sustainability challenges, provide input into business strategy, and keep abreast of stakeholder concerns;
• FIs are expected to adopt baseline CSR as an industry norm, using the international standards that have been developed for the industry through various international fora.

The author also mentions that while the aforesaid predictions, by nature, are inconclusive, most thought leaders were confident that sustainability will become increasingly mainstreamed within finance over the decade, given the strength of the trend currently underway.