The chief executive of Standard Chartered has condemned rival banks that have dropped their climate commitments amid mounting political pressure.
Speaking to journalists on Thursday, Bill Winters criticised banks that had jumped on the climate bandwagon when it was “fashionable”, but had since rolled back on their green ambitions or gone quiet on the subject.
“Shame on them,” he said, without naming individual firms.
His comments came weeks after HSBC became the first UK-headquartered bank to leave the global Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), in a further blow to international climate coordination efforts.
The UN environment programme’s finance initiative, which is led by banks, commits members to aligning their lending, investment and capital markets activities with net zero emissions by 2050 or earlier.
HSBC was one of the founding members of the NZBA, which was launched in 2021. At the time, Noel Quinn, the bank’s then chief executive, said industry-wide collaboration was “essential to monitoring progress” towards net zero.
The decision to leave the initiative came months after HSBC revealed it would delay key parts of its climate goals for the next 20 years, and water down other environmental targets, as part of a long-term bonus plan for Quinn’s successor, Georges Elhedery, who took over last year.
It also followed a wave of exits from the NZBA by big US banks including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs during the run-up to Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.
Trump’s second term has sparked a wide-ranging climate backlash from rightwing politicians, who have been emboldened by his anti-green push for higher oil and gas production.
On Thursday, Winters said: “People that said a lot of stuff, but [when] it was fashionable to say it, [and] who are saying either nothing or the opposite now: shame on them.”
He said most of Standard Chartered’s clients – from across China, India, wider Asia and the Middle East – were “as focused on their net zero transitions, or their transitions to low carbon economy, as they were before. And that obviously is good for business.”
“A lot of these projects just make sense economically,” Winters added. “Most continue to honour the obligations that they made to their shareholders or other stakeholders early on, independent of political noise one way or the other.”
During HSBC’s second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Elhedery said the decision to drop its NZBA membership was “not cost related”.
He added that HSBC remained “fully committed in our ambition to become a net-zero bank by 2050” and was undertaking a review of interim targets for 2030, which would conclude in the second half of this year.
