Skip to content
Report

Leadership strategies for client engagement: advancing climate-related assessments

This report is designed to support the financial sector to improve assessment and interactions with clients in line with net zero plans. It has been created as part of the UNEP FI TCFD programme and builds on the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership’s Banking Environment Initiative Let’s Discuss Climate: the essential guide to bank-client engagement.

Key points

The report prvides six recommendations that serve to advance climate-related assessments for use in client engagement, of which three are directed at client-facing staff:
– Based on the Guide, seek internal collaborations to locate, sort and collect the data and insights you need for client engagement.
– Invest time in educational opportunities to ensure you ask the right questions, understand the data and interpret climate-related assessments for client dialogues.
– Use assessments of forward-looking plans and share experiences of client engagement so internal processes can be improved to support climate objectives.

and three are in the sphere of control of group strategy teams:
– Build on the Guide’s structure to determine sector-specific questionnaires that ensure data is collected in an efficient and coherent manner.
– Increase the usability of data and insights to allow a wide variety of internal stakeholders to better locate and analyse asset-level data for use in assessment, client engagement and product innovation.
– Strengthen in-house processes and capabilities for transition-plan evaluation tools and methodologies across business lines.

The report also presents case studies on client engagement from financial institutions