Bad Tölz, Bavaria, Germany
Experienced banker with 30 years spent in the lending business, since March 2023 in a new, exciting position allowing me to return to a “question of my life”: how to reconcile the needs of a modern economy with protection of our natural ecosystems. My role entails advice to loan originators and risk managers to thoughtfully reflect environmental & social factors in credit underwriting and portfolio steering. My conviction is: In the long run, only ecologically sustainable technologies can be creditworthy technologies. Hence, the mission is to support sustainable lending - which includes accompanying customers in their transition. Very often, Siemens offers the right products and solutions for our customers' pathways, so financing and technology proposal can be combined. Recent years have shown a remarkable shift of responsibility for environmental and social topics in the direction of the private sector. In this context, I’m an advocate of some of the emerging Sustainable Finance frameworks guiding the structural change in industry and banks to less pollution and more inclusion. As we also see, Sustainable Finance confronts practitioners with many initiatives, new vocabulary and abbreviations, new data points and metrics as well as sophisticated modelling, accounting and reporting standards. In parallel, we observe an explosion of green marketing, sometimes trying to harvest the ethical fruit for distant commitments already nowadays. This is fine, at the same time these concepts and announcements must live up to their actual promise: progress for people and planet in the real world - for me that’s cleaner fuels and technology, increasingly circular product design, preserving scarce resources and ecosystems, tackling the waste problem, improving people’s lives - while admitting that trade-off situations can arise between these targets: to be considered thoughtfully in business decisions, to be solved democratically in our societies and to be balanced in a fair manner between the countries of our world.