 I'm Simon Connell. I'm a senior associate here at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and I currently work as a director at Beringa Partners at Management Consultancy focused on climate and sustainability. So I've had a long-standing relationship with what was originally the Cambridge programme for industry and is now CISL. I was lucky enough to be sponsored by my employer on the programme some years ago now and since then have been involved in the Banking Environment Initiative which is the banking-focused part of the Centre for Sustainable Finance here and after some years of working with the BEI in a number of settings I was lucky enough to be elected by my peers as the chair of the BEI for a period of about three years prior to stepping out of the banking sector and into consultancy. So the role I now play as well as maintaining that relationship is to help guide and provide market insight to the team working on the BEI in terms of the things we're seeing clients concerned around the change and the challenges that they're trying to grapple with and therefore helping to make sure that the BEI's work is really focused on helping to provide the practical tools to that senior community of change makers within banking and financial services. So I think the finance sector is really interesting. It wraps around the society in which we live and work and there's always this question around whether it's an active or a passive wrapper and in recent years embracing concepts like ESG we've seen the finance sector take a more active role we've seen a significant number of new people stepping into roles to help financial institutions there's been a significant upskilling, a significant amount of resource and the need to make sure that all those people have the baseline knowledge and competencies to perform their roles effectively as well as supporting their wider organisations but at the same time we've seen some headwinds on progress towards sustainable development we've seen questions about whether we are truly heading for a Paris aligned 1.5 degree outcome whether we're delivering on the SDGs we've seen some backward slipping against progress on the SDGs in consequence of the pandemic and therefore we're perhaps at a point at which we need a renewed sense of energy and optimism about our ability to achieve those goals so that that community that we've created can progress towards that and so I think as much as anything this is about hearts and minds at this point in time it's making sure people have the tools but also they believe that they have the ability to help us achieve those goals and to do so in a way that is consistent with the mandates of their financial institutions their wider organisational objectives purpose and profit if you will so we've seen a significant growth in individuals working within climate sustainability ESG within financial services we've seen a need to upskill those individuals and their wider organisations and to equip them to tackle these challenges and a recognition that those challenges are in many ways growing broader by the day questions around whether we'll achieve Paris alignment at 1.5 degrees backward progress on the UN sustainable development goals in consequence of the pandemic and therefore there is still a significant quantity of capital required to achieve these outcomes financial institutions need to know that they are able to achieve the returns they want in helping support those goals and the individuals working in this space need the confidence, the courage to guide their organisation in turbulent times and keep an eye on that long term objective so we have a phenomenal opportunity here we've spent the day today with some of our 68 fellows and senior associates and to realise that we're now collectively if we think across the alumni population popular for around 33,000 people we have immense resources at our disposal immense ability to effect change and we do so by making things very practical through the work that we do across our different platforms we take those expert practitioners and we give people the tools and the techniques they need to drive change and so to be able to use that community to have the wider reach and to reach as many people as possible that's been a lot of the focus of our conversations today is who should we be working with to deliver that change at systems level but to make sure that whilst we're aiming for that systems level change it's practical for people as well it was a real pleasure to see in Montreal in December of last year that the global biodiversity framework was agreed a set of goals and targets to try and halt and reverse nature loss within that target 15 committed governments around the world to increasing disclosures that are going to come from corporate and financial institutions and we've been really pleased to see the work of the task force on nature related financial disclosures in helping that move forward practically so through its beta phases over the course of the past couple of years and looking forward to September this year when we will see the final TNFD release it's been great to see people acknowledging climate is not a single dimension of a problem there is a climate nature axis as much as there is a just transition dimension and others and therefore thinking about how the climate action they're taking already both relies on nature but also can help restore nature but also thinking about nature itself as a wider challenge to so forth within financial services