 Hello everyone. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime, albeit on a principally fish-based diet. Teach a man to fish and then give him a loan to my nets in a boat. He increases his economic activity and feeds part of his village. You're a banker. Teach a man a fish, give him a loan for the net in the boat, but make sure that the net has got holes large enough so that the small fish don't get caught as well, wiping out the entire fish stocks and thinking from the previous talk about sort of where those fish nets would go as well, you become a sustainable banker and you're more relevant in your community. What on earth is sustainable banking? I did a workshop earlier and in a way the first question, what is banking, is already a pretty difficult question. Putting the two together creates this kind of huge explosion. When we talk about sustainability and banking, a lot of the time that gets reduced to something which isn't about the sustainability that a lot of us talk about in terms of ecological responsibility, intergenerational equity, how we figure out how to work as a society and be resilient into the future, a lot of it is around how do banks just keep going. In a way we kind of got into this question before, the shadow question here of how can the world help save banking? This is around seven years after the crash of Lehman that we're sort of standing here and we still haven't figured out how that happens. In a way we're almost bored of the question. The world kind of went mad and we're sort of caught up in the madness. It was like sort of the old Uncle Bob and he's now thinks he's a chicken and you sort of talk to your other relatives and say hey you know Uncle Bob he thinks he's a chicken. Yeah well we know but we could use the eggs and as a consequence regulations that comes into to help the world save banking doesn't really go to the bigger more challenging question which I want to reverse and have this reveal for the question today which is how can banking help save the world? Let's just dwell a moment in terms of that because that's supposed to be quite arresting. What do we mean by help save the world? What are the things happening in the world? We have huge global challenges, climate change, resource scarcity, things in water but in terms of social relationships, the inequality and polarization in society, driving huge things which we see now crystallizing in the refugee crisis. We see an aging population paired with huge youth unemployment in a lot of Europe. What role could banking possibly have in this? Well what role do we have in this? We see sort of here I'm representing sort of the ascent of man up to this staircase and we sort of see we're at this precipice and we do feel that there is this kind of sense of normal being over. You could argue well we've always managed to come out of it before and we've always managed to kind of step out and societies managed to go on and and this isn't really anything really new we've seen things in history and to an extent that's true although if you really look at societies in history societies have a history of sometimes thriving and sometimes failing and the global challenges the interconnected global challenges which we're now facing the fact that climate and resource scarcity and polarization and all those things trends are globally connected we are now talking about the one global society either thriving or failing. That's massive that's that's that's a huge global question where on earth can individuals take in terms of a next step well you've really got as Joanna Macy the philosopher in Berkeley University said three choices you either just keep going as you are and think la la la business as usual we'll find some solution out of somewhere and that may well cause us falling off the edge you could go into panic and fear and curl up into a ball and just wish it wasn't happening and get very angry or you can just connect to whatever it is within you that you feel that you can do in order to make a difference and find other people who you can connect with to be able to make that difference feel more tangible and more real and in a way this community here is sort of in own different ways searching for that and we do find our own particular ways we have something which is within ourselves which is our connection to whatever the the particular localised force that you recognise from this is something which you want to to give to the world in your own way and find that freedom of expression and entrepreneurialism and somewhere there's also you as a citizen within part of a community saying this is what we collectively need and somehow you need to be able to match these for this freedom and this energy and this will of people with what you need in a community and that is the potential for banking the possibility space for banking to be what it was really supposedly designed for which is a way of being able to facilitate and enable so that human relationships could could figure out how individual enterprise could really meet the needs of communities and to sort out the good agreements the contracts negotiating the best kind of set of agreements for how we're going to arrange all this now yes there's practices and processes which can look more technical in terms of risk but that's all it is it's just being able to arrange different sets of human relationships so that we can do things differently and hopefully get to a next step which may or may not be up but is feeling like the best step for us as a community I always get dry mouth present presented in terms of the solutions there's already lots of established solutions in terms of global crisis is in terms of climate change there's already plenty of renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions for us to solve the climate crisis a big problem now how do you determine how do you organize people in order to make that happen there was no last lack of money to be able to save the banks in the banking crisis they should not be money is being the issue it is about the banking issue of how do you make the contracts between people to make that happen similarly in terms of sustainable agriculture and organic principles in terms of how we feed ourselves how we use resources the circular economy and before the existing solutions and all the wealth of existing social entrepreneurial models there's the entirety of the wealth of creativity amongst everyone in society who says I think I've got something which I can do and I can innovate to do this better and for that you need someone within the community who's selected who's hired by the community to say you be our banker and you figure out how this creative energy how this innovation can work with us in this way to use to channel our money and what we're going to do and our part of it in order to to make this sound in order to make this so that it reaches the scale that we want it to within our community to make that work and that is a fundamentally human judgment and at Triados Bank we have this this is our our principle it's really at three levels firstly at that level of motivation to really reach to the entrepreneur and understand that motivation that we are genuinely interested in what is that motivation what is this this this spark it's not just about the money that that comes later because that's in pursuit of of serving the purpose of what is this motivation the next level is in the in the social sphere if you look at how the how the interactions are worked around a business there's customers there's suppliers there's employees there's other stakeholders around how are things kept in the right balance so that everybody feels like yeah this this feels like something which is which is positive and productive this isn't exploitative it's not unbalanced and at the base level at the eco level both of the economic level and the ecological level it makes sense it delivers the the returns and doesn't extract from the planet the the resources which are which are necessary for others it is sustainable from an economic point of view and the level of return that it needs to generate will be appropriate and balanced against well well what is it trying to do and what does it look like and these three levels the motivation the social and the eco the economical and the the ecological level is the judgment that the banker must form in order to say is this is this viable is this something which we can which we can bring into the world and that is the responsibility of someone who is a sustainable banker now that's quite a difficult thing to kind of expound in this day and age because it uses a few concepts like balance well everyone thinks one something wants to be one thing or the other balance is a messy concept balance requires human judgment it requires some degrees of compromise it degrees of well negotiation and imperfection and yet that's the human world that we are in this is humanity we are not perfect beings there is not one silver bullet solution it's about understanding and relationship and being able to work out well if you've got a set of skills and a will to do something but you actually really need somebody else to work with you to to compliment then that's part of the the constructive dialogue that the banker needs to have in order to make that work in order to give it the best chance and within that concept of balance we're also balancing not just the the returns and the financial return and the fact that we need to look after savings of depositors or the money that that's that's being invested in through us into the community not only the risks in terms of what it is that could go wrong and making sure that we've done the best work that we have to be able to make things as safe as possible will never be safe but in terms of impact and the positive impact which we have is always going to be in context of understanding well what is the what is the relative benefit that this has for a community let me give you some examples in Lima there's a bank called mi banco where the loan officers get up in the morning and they spend a little bit of time in their community on their computers but then pretty much early in the morning they are in downtown Lima in their community and that's where they stay and they hang out for the whole day and they know everybody and they're able to respond quickly because they've grown up and they are in complete relationship within their community they're not going to stiff anybody because they live there and they have to show up the next day and the day after that they're able to respond quickly because when somebody approaches them they're not just a faceless thing which has come through the internet and popped up as a loan application which has to be processed through some from algorithm and then notes typed up they're the person who they've grown up with they know they know the parents they know the uncle and aunt they know who they've spoken to they know the interconnection they they're able to ask the constructive questions to be able to make it work within triados bank we we work with a number of entrepreneurs social entrepreneurs environmental entrepreneurs some of the principles which we work to are really being able to make sure that we demonstrate impact through transparency but also use that transparency to make it clear to the community what is happening and how we're doing this we had we had a very successful bank account which offered no interest at all you parked a thousand euros with us and it was called the chicken and egg account we took the thousand euros and we collect those up and we lent money to sustainable organic farmers raising chickens and we said we're not going to give you any interest but we'll give you a voucher for eggs and so you can go to the shop and you can you can take some eggs for five years and then you get your money back and in the meantime basically you've been helping the farmer and that's how that's how the circle goes we're gonna actually have after five years you got the chicken that didn't work out so well but we've we've worked in a variety of ways in being able to mobilize some of these complex situations and we're looking now at the energy crisis and looking at how do we how do we help for example health and social care organizations or arts and cultural buildings to save energy and heating and lighting and we're taking inspirations from some of the work which we do in emerging markets through partners so for example in Mongolia where where a bank called Hasbank has insulated hundreds of thousands of people's wooden huts that the gays in in Ulaanbaatar which is the second coldest capital city in the world and being able to mobilize again finance for the good of community there's lots of examples and we publish every single loan that we do part of that transparency is being able to enable the community to make decisions and to have a dialogue with us we are we're owned by ordinary people thousands of them our customers we're not on the stock market in fact we don't even give people a true vote because our mission is enshrined by a foundation who owns us who who protect what we are going to do we we don't want to be democratic from the point of view of voting we want to be democratic from the point of view of reaching out and having genuine dialogue with people so thousands of people all over Europe come to our annual meetings and will challenge us on what we're doing and how we can be doing more of it and and the the dialogue I can tell you is not about you know why can't they get higher interest rates or more return it's about how can we be doing more in the world and being more relevant and this is happening across the world and it's radiating there is a network of banks the global alliance for banking on values which with microfinance organizations and credit unions and all different types of banking models is purposefully setting out to see how can they how can they learn from one another they're already serving 20 million customers and it's it's quite sizable there are from the from the top down through UNEPFI there's now a project on positive impact which I'm part of which is looking at how do you enable large banks to actually start to collaborate with each other and harness some of the latent skills and energy that people have to say how do we figure out how to do more in the world and tackle relevant problems how do we how do we mobilize that how do we experiment with that and there's taking disruptors within businesses of the finance innovation lab will be working with all sorts of new innovators crowdfunding for renewable energy and such to like to be able to bring a disruption into the financial sector and and try to kind of have a more diverse and fair system I can tell the times up I'm not going to be much longer in terms of banks and what we will do in terms of the value-based banking world we're trying to scale up what's there when I started 18 years ago in triados bank which was a tiny little bank we'd had a balance sheet of 20 million in the UK and we're now over 12 billion euros I made a loan to a small cooperative of Welsh Hill farmers doing a wind energy scheme and it was tiny in comparison now to what you see in renewables and that being able to scale up sort of sort of reiterates that now renewable energy you see a wind farm it's just commonplace fair trade it's almost become boring and passe I think it's Rebecca Solner who said you never get to celebrate the victories you have sometimes because by the time you've achieved it everyone goes yeah but that's that's obvious now so what we need to do is look for renewal how can we look to do the next thing the refugee crisis right now we're asking ourselves tough questions about what it is we can do how can we find the social entrepreneurs who are going to make a difference our innovation is fairly frugal because all we have to do really is just listen well to find the people who've got ideas and figure out how we can connect up the system to give them the best support the final part of it is being able to shift habits so asking me me asking this question can banking help save the world is really going to be a challenge for you because in a way it's our own behaviors which can sometimes prevent this question being asked unwittingly by engaging in the same old ways with the banking institutions which we have and and our deference towards them can sometimes reiterate and build on the current situation however it's predicated on our understanding of money and money is sort of dirty and it's it's it's a weird concept and it's it's something which we don't want to go to because it feels like it's technical and we only engage in it when it's reading bills or mortgage statements or all of that stuff and how do you connect all of this meaning and life purpose to the point that money is just in service of that and it's just an instrument to be able to serve it and therefore if money is in service of meaning can we then translate it for banks really being in service of society I believe it can and by being able to do some of that inner work in terms of what we think banks are doing within our communities and changing the conversation we have with banks with each other about what we can do we can reframe we can reframe the situation and dig into some of the internal freedoms and energies of people in the banking sector who are equally horrified by the ugliness of the financial crisis and all that's being created and are desperate to unleash themselves to actually find their own higher meaning and purpose and together we might be able to help banking help save the world thanks very much