ASFI is working to support and encourage stronger leadership from financial institutions, and overcome some of the systemic challenges that prevent the finance sector making more progress towards Roadmap implementation.
Finance Sector Leadership
The Roadmap highlights the critical role of leadership from the finance sector to unlock progress towards Australia’s climate, environment and social inclusion ambitions.
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Our Finance Sector Leadership Work
Our 2023 Progress Tracker indicated that as little as 7% of financial professionals have green skills, lagging other industries critical to achieving global sustainability targets. And Australia has a lower concentration of green talent in the finance sector than countries such as US, Germany, UK & Canada.
In more mature professions such as accounting, banking, and investment, complex ecosystems exist to support capability that include: universities providing a large range of undergraduate, post-graduate and executive education courses; industry bodies that run accreditation systems for professionals including ongoing requirements for professional learning; a broad range of providers of courses that can count towards continuing professional development; and a well-established pathway for people from university or other technical qualifications into the profession.
Given its early stage of development, the sustainable finance profession is yet to establish this sort of ecosystem. ASFI is uniquely placed to accelerate the development of a sustainable finance ecosystem to support capability development and underpin trust in and credibility of sustainable finance as a profession
In 2024 ASFI is launching a variety of initiatives to strengthen sustainable finance leadership. These are listed below.
ASFI initiatives to strengthen finance sector leadership
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Enhancing Capability on Sustainable Finance
ASFI is committed to uplifting finance sector capability to develop the mindsets, behaviours and skills needed to power the transformation required to deliver sustainable finance commitments and ambitions.
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ASFI Learn
In 2024, ASFI will develop and deliver trainings to the finance sector to teach key sustainable finance skills.
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ASFI Leadership Working Group
This is a cohort based program for executives from ASFI member organisations looking to share and learn best practice strategies that increase sustainability outcomes. EOIs to join the working group in 2024 are now open.
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Sustainable Finance Mentor Program
Driven by the pursuit of limitless impact, our mentor program for sustainable finance professionals (‘Limitless’) is a new approach to mentoring - developing the capability the sector needs to drive the impact the world needs.
