When she was working in China around 10 years ago – this was before the country’s clean-air campaign took off – Ms Helen Wong was hit by the acrid smell of polluted air in Beijing the moment she stepped out of the plane.

It was a far cry from her childhood, which was filled with fond memories of long hikes in the fresh air in Hong Kong with her family. OCBC Bank’s group chief executive, who is a lifelong nature lover and the first woman to head a Singapore bank, said to me: “Mankind progresses, but as we progress, we also destroy. Now we need to save and rebuild.”

Saving and rebuilding is something the bank is familiar with. It recently announced plans to grow 18,000 carbon-sequestering mangrove trees in Pulau Ubin and Malaysia – just a few years after it planted 50 species of native coastal plants on Coney Island, and conserved 2,000 endangered, carbon dioxide-soaking giant trees in the Botanic Gardens.

Setting goals

But climate strategy is more than just restoring vegetation. OCBC’s covers five drivers: business; innovation and technology; people; operations; and policies and systems. Five members of the bank’s management committee, who are also the bank’s senior management, lead these drivers.

In 2019, the bank stopped financing new coal-fired power plants. The following year, it became a signatory to the Equator Principles, a risk management framework to determine, assess and manage environmental and social risks associated with financing large-scale projects. It was the first bank in South-east Asia to adopt the Poseidon Principles in 2021 to decarbonise the shipping sector.

It has also been implementing recommendations by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). In 2021, it published an inaugural TCFD report on managing climate risks and opportunities. It will publish the next report together with a sustainability report in April 2023.

The bank has doubled its sustainable financing goal to $50 billion by 2025, a goal which is likely to be met ahead of time. As a signatory to the United Nations-convened Net-Zero Banking Alliance, it is also looking at sectoral financed emission targets by the first half of 2023.

Going back to the fundamentals

All this sounds impressive. But I pointed out that many have grown sceptical of corporate environmental commitments because of greenwashing, or companies claiming to be environmentally conscious for public relations purposes.

The recently concluded COP27 climate summit, where parties failed to make stronger commitments to cut emissions, also drives home the question: Can commercial interest ever be reconciled with the public good?

Ms Wong doesn’t think the two are mutually exclusive. One of the first things she learnt about banks, she said, is that they are intermediaries which use people’s money to help others realise their dreams.

Doing well financially only serves half their purpose; the other half is about doing right. “If you cannot help your customers do what is right, then it defeats the fundamentals of banking,” she added.

Context matters too. She said that in Asean, some countries are still in the developmental phase. “So to say that we will stop everything that pollutes is impossible. Because you’re not doing something right to support economies to grow, and be able to some day by themselves have the ability to achieve net zero.”

Decarbonisation isn’t just for the big boys; there is also demand in the marketplace among smaller firms and retail customers.

By the end of 2022, more than 600 small and medium-sized enterprise customers are expected to take up more than $3 billion in sustainable financing with OCBC across Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Making friends

Partnerships are key to the bank’s sustainability efforts. Earlier in 2022, OCBC, together with electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions provider Charge+, launched 10 EV charging points at the OCBC Centre carpark. Both sides had signed an agreement in 2021 to implement 10,000 EV charging points across Singapore by 2030.

In August, OCBC announced a joint study with the National University of Singapore to understand the best ways to get Singaporeans to switch to EVs. The bank also gives EV owners preferential car loan rates compared with petrol and diesel car owners.

Another one of its partners is airport services company Sats. To find innovative ways to address sustainability challenges across industries, it held the inaugural OCBC Sustainability Innovation Challenge together with Sats in 2022.

The bank will fund the two winning projects – related to waste treatment, and the recycling of packaging and food scraps – with up to $80,000 each so that they can pilot their solutions at Sats.

Sustainability begins at home

The bank has formal structures for sustainability. These include a sustainability council chaired by Ms Wong herself, and more than 20 staff training modules that have been co-developed with sustainability experts, both within the bank and externally. The training is available to all 30,000 employees across the group and in markets where OCBC operates.

But to generate interest and momentum, informal structures are just as important.

From staff volunteers who braved the mud in Pulau Ubin to clean up its mangrove area to a sustainability interest group set up by the bank’s staff, sustainability is everyone’s obligation, said Ms Wong.

She believes that one of the best ways to fulfil this obligation is to make a personal pledge. For example, she makes it a point not to waste water and electricity, or to buy water stored in plastic bottles.

Simple steps like these make it easier for people to acquire green habits and stick to them, she said. “Now people have adjusted to not carrying plastic bags around, and they bring their own shopping bags. Think about how much plastic we’ve reduced.”

Her latest pledge is to consume less beef, which has a high carbon footprint. It’s a timely reminder to meat lovers like myself to be more mindful of how and what we consume.

She points out that while this is a simple pledge, the beauty of it is that it’s incremental and achievable.

“I think I can do it,” she said. “And I hope everybody will come up with some form of pledge to make our planet a better and more sustainable place to live in.”