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Hello and welcome to Trust and transformations - leaders navigating change. I am Geir Fuglerud, the CEO of DNV Supply Chain and Product Assurance Business Area, and I'm joined by Eugene Wong, the Chief Executive Officer of the Sustainable Finance Institute Asia.
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The Sustainable Finance Institute Asia, SFIA for short, is an independent institute established to catalyze ideas on sustainable finance at the policy level, as well as propel actions in support of those policy ideas in Asia, particularly in Southeast Asian nations. The Sustainable Finance Institute of Asia is in collaboration with governments, regulators, central banks, multilateral development banks, industry, academia and non-governmental organizations. So, Eugene, welcome to the podcast.
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Well, thank you very much Geir, I'm delighted to be here.
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So, Eugene, as a leader in sustainable finance, you have guided the Sustainable Finance Institute Asia through a rapidly changing financial and environmental landscape. And in later years, we have seen a rapidly expanding digital economy in Asia in particular. We are also seeing that investors are increasingly prioritizing ESG criteria, driving corporations and governments to adopt sustainable business practice and improve transparency.
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How would you describe your leadership style and how do you ensure that your team stays motivated and aligned with the institute's long-term goals?
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Well that's a great question to start with, Geir, and I will say at the onset that what we try and do as a very young and small organization is to create an organization of leaders rather than an organization with a leader. Are you a Star Trek fan?
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I am, I do like science fiction.
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That's brilliant because I don't really have a direct answer to your question and I thought that I would reference Star Trek which has had a stellar team of different leaders coming across different series.
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I think what's really important is not so much how I see my own leadership style but how my team sees it. And when I was actually a regulator and had a large team under me in a very predefined set of circumstances, I think I was very much like Captain Picard, so I was very measured in my actions, I was committed to a very established mandate from my organization and I would make decisions after going through a very robust thought process.
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But now that I'm in the sustainable finance field that's moving very quickly, of course it's very different. So in the past you could compare me to Picard because I had the right infrastructure, I had everything in place and the mandate was very clear. Now we're in a situation where everything's quite different so I start to make decisions more quickly, more boldly, I have more innovation, I'm more on the ground and I think I take more risks, unlike Picard. So my team starts to commend that I'm behaving more like Kirk than Picard.
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But ultimately, I think what is really, really important to any captain is the competence, the commitment and the loyalty of the crew and I'm grateful I have that. It is obviously important to keep the crew very engaged, very motivated, particularly in very difficult times with very difficult resources and I have to say that they are very self-motivated and very self-driven in that respect. So I'm indeed fortunate to have that. I just need to keep the momentum going for the crew.
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So, and Eugene, before we dive into the big topics around global transformation and I think we will be spending quite some time on it, and you already mentioned kind of how dynamic this field of practice is. But I'm curious, when you are facing change or uncertainty, what's the first thing you do to ensure that you stay focused on what truly matters?
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Right, so I think it's inevitable that we face a lot of change and uncertainty in this particular field and definitely as a convening platform, we have to manage many moving parts so change and uncertainty is part and parcel of the work, but that doesn't mean that it's something that we can accept easily because it is very tough. And change and uncertainty, particularly change, can upend months of work and requires to go back to the drawing board.
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The team and I always try and focus on keeping the momentum. We accept that change will take place and sometimes rapidly in a very, very bad time. We accept that uncertainty is something that we have to deal with, but we also understand that it is because there's so much change and uncertainty that a neutral, convening platform like ourselves can play a very important role.
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So I talked about keeping the momentum going, but at the same time, to be very zen about this, it's not always bad that we have changed and sometimes in that change, we find opportunities as well that were never there.
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Yeah, I think that is very correct, as you say and I think those pivot points, right, where you really need to reconsider the path you're on, I think those can be extremely valuable.
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Indeed, and I think where we find that there is change, we should also try and see where the opportunity and the silver lining is. Now, it's not always the case. Sometimes it's just all bleak and you've wasted a lot of work and time but then again, you can always say and clock it up to experience and move on from there. So change and uncertainty, part and parcel of the work, important to keep the momentum going, mistakes will happen, just plod along.
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Yeah, accept that as part of the journey.
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Yeah, keep calm and carry on, I think.
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So then into the topic of transformation. So, sustainable finance is becoming a core part of how economies are now planning their future and futures. How do you see sustainable finance playing a role in shaping Asia's growth over the next decade or the next few decades, particularly as countries try to balance development, economic and environmental commitments?
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We are actually fighting a war with two battles right now. The first battle is to try and deal with the effects of climate change. Of course, climate change is a global phenomenon. It's not just that if we cut the emissions in Southeast Asia, everything will be great for us. It takes the whole world to move together. The second is really about social equality and if we lose either of these battles, we lose the whole war.
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So right now developing countries and emerging markets are trying to grow responsibly and sustainably, so we need to be able to build sustainable finance as a way of discipline because finance is the allocator of capital. And if we are able to actually have that safeguard in how capital is being allocated, it would certainly help us. Southeast Asia is particularly concerned about this.
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We are concerned about how we are going to achieve our commitments under the Paris Agreement. We are concerned about how we are going to achieve the SDGs. And what we finding is that everybody from the regulators down to the real economy, they are trying to see what sort of self-discipline and market discipline and regulatory discipline can be imposed. And of course, because money makes the world go round, if we are able to provide this sort of support through sustainable finance, this sort of guide rails through sustainable finance, we would be able to chart better allocation of resources and therefore better outcomes for both economies and communities.
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So, what do you then see as the biggest challenge facing sustainable finance today, especially in emerging economies of Asia, as you already touched upon to some extent?
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There's really no difference in terms of the problems that the sustainable finance ecosystem has globally, so we can distil it down to six major gaps. The first is the risk and reward profiles for sustainable projects are actually a challenge because there's a gap there and a lot of the sustainability projects, particularly when it comes to the social elements, they don't adequately compensate for the risks that we see.
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The second is the capacity because people just don't understand how to execute these projects, they don't understand how to get the finance flowing and this is partially due to the third gap, which is awareness and behavioural change, which we don't fully have yet, because we have to understand that with a lot of emerging economies, people don't have time to worry about the future, they're struggling to survive today.
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This leads to the other problem which is how we want to get policy, and the markets aligned because there is also a big need for us to be able to align the policy actions and the market reactions and the market actions as well. That leads to the next problem we have, which is essentially coordination.
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There's coordination that's needed within markets, there's coordination that's needed within government and how government markets and the rest of the stakeholders like academia, civil society come together to coordinate. Everyone has slightly different goals because everyone has different outcomes that they want, they're in different situations and circumstances so that challenge will come. And because of all this, there is a gap between the demand and the supply for sustainable finance.
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Now, if we're able to fix the ecosystem, we would be able to better drive the availability and access of sustainable finance and therefore be able to promote the agenda. This is not unusual; I think it is an ecosystem problem that we're facing globally, but it's particularly acute for emerging markets and developing countries and of course you know Geir, the issue that we have is that the most vulnerable countries are the ones with the highest cost of capital and the most difficulties in accessing capital. So how do you really orient the capital to help them.
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I wanted to follow up a little bit on market coordination. You mentioned that, right? Because one of the situations we see now is that there is more and more taxonomies kind of within the geographical regions but also globally. I don't know how many we're talking about now, maybe 40 globally. Is this a challenge that we're kind of ending up with so many different ways at looking at this?
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It's an absolute nightmare, Geir. When we started developing the ASEAN taxonomy, there were less than 20 official taxonomies developed or under development, much less than that. Today, we have over 50 official taxonomies being developed, having been developed and if you look at the internal taxonomies that are significant, so if you look at the financial institutions who have their own taxonomies, that’s at least another 150.
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So we're grappling with 200 taxonomies. So taxonomies which were designed to actually consolidate the ability of the markets to direct and orient capital have now ended up creating fragmentation. It's not just the taxonomies, it's also the transition finance approaches, for instance. If you look since late 2020 till today, you look at the number of guidances that have come out on transition finance, that's also huge.
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So what are we going to do about this? Is that going to change? The answer is no. Why are there so many taxonomies? It's because the situation of every country is different so they have different starting points, different access to resources, different access to financial resources, then different economic, social and political situations. And therefore, if we come up with one taxonomy that directs how everyone is supposed to behave in a one-size-fits-all approach, everyone's going to come out defensively and say, no, let me contextualize what I really need. And that's really what's happened.
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If we turn back to the Paris Agreement, Article 21C is very clear. It talks about how we should have common but differentiated responsibilities. So we need to go back to that because we need to recognize that everyone is going to come from a different starting point and have different access to resources and when we execute 21C, we have to realize that the common but differentiated responsibilities in Article 2 has to be reflected appropriately. So what do we do? Well, we can't ask everyone to forego their national priorities and agendas, but what we can ask everyone to do is to try and make things as interoperable as possible.
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Yeah, no, I think that's very, very important. You mentioned the term transition finance, Eugene and transition finance, that term is increasingly being used in the context of sustainable finance. Maybe you can explain what is really meant by this term.
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Right, so we can't decarbonize overnight and there are many different definitions that have come up for transition finance but essentially, I can summarize it to say that transition finance is any form of finance or financial services to help you move from where you are today, your current starting point, towards a low carbon economy or decarbonization.
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One very important thing that we have to account for is actually that we need to look at how to make this just, so the SDGs actually do have a role to play in it because sometimes while we push for decarbonization very rapidly because we need it, it may also cause social and economic dislocations, particularly for emerging and developing economies.
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So we need to be able to transition in a fair and just manner, in an orderly manner so that it's not disruptive. And to understand transition finance, I think we first have to understand what transition is and I like to tell people that transition is actually a marriage between ambition and reality. And as we all know, marriages are always not easy and marrying ambition and reality is something that's really challenging.
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So transition finance is something you hear a lot of but you don't see much of and the challenges are because you are trying to create that balance and that balance is not clearly defined consistently by all the different stakeholders. Also, transition finance requires you to be forward-looking because it's not about where you are today, it's about how you decarbonize moving forward. So it is important that we are able to have a credible way to assess the pathway forward. That's obviously not so easy to do today, particularly because there no common definitions and that's why transition finance is something that's so critical, but at the same time we haven't seen enough of.
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So, but continuing on the topic of transition finance, because the ASEAN transition finance guidance was introduced to support a more structured transition towards sustainability in the region. So how do you see this framework impacting the financial landscape in Southeast Asia and what role does the Sustainable Finance Institute Asia play in guiding organizations through this transition?
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I'm glad you asked the question about the role we play in guiding organizations. So I just wanted to maybe provide some clarification on that. We're actually a convening platform that's dedicated to creating a better sustainable finance ecosystem and as a result, we kind of don't deal with individual companies, but what we really aim to do is to create the frameworks and platforms for them to be able use to credibly access sustainable finance to support them in their sustainability agendas.
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I mentioned just now that there a lot of guidances out there on transition finance and there are a lot of questions as to why did ASEAN come up with its own guidance. Well, the answer is actually quite simple. We have some really, really good guidances out there, but the issue is that many of them are global and they don't address the contextualization that we need in Southeast Asia.
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So if you look at where we're at in Southeast Asia, our highest GDP per capita per annum is about 82,000 US dollars and our lowest is about 1,100.
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It’s a huge gap right and everyone says that the EU has that problem too. But if our average GDP per capita per annum is about 5,004, if I remember correctly, and I think the EU said 37,500. So again, the gap's very big. So we needed to contextualize something for our region.
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There are 71 million micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in the region and they're really the backbone of the economy. Most people are hired by these MSMEs. They contribute so much to the output that we have. But they are the ones who are actually going to struggle the most to transition.
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So one big issue with the existing transition finance guidances is that they all target the 1.5 degree outcome. We don't think that all our companies, if at all many of our companies, can reach 1.5, but the Paris Agreement actually talks about well below 2. The second thing is that a lot of the pathways that are used are actually global pathways but in Southeast Asia, you need to contextualize geographically and sectorally as well, and they didn't provide that.
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Now, what is the issue if you set the standard too high? So many of us who have come from developing nations know that we used to have classmates who had to work very hard because they would come to school early in the morning and then they would go off in the afternoons, help their parents in their little small businesses until late at night, wake up, repeat the process and work full-time at supporting their parents over the weekend.
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They performed poorly in school and of course, know, at that time the education system was such that if you didn't meet a certain benchmark, you're out of school. So rather than providing help to nurture them and to support them in their very difficult situation, they had to leave school.
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Some of these guys could have been geniuses who could have invented all sorts of different things, they could have been great bankers, but now they are in a situation where they are part again of a marginalised group. It's the same with countries. If they don't have the capacity, they don't have the capability and you force them to adopt something that's not suitable for them, they are out of the game. And we want everyone in the game because one of the biggest challenges we have today with sustainable finance is that it's not inclusive enough. We need to make it inclusive.
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So the ASEAN Transition Finance Guidance tries to approach this in two ways. The first is that we allow tiering. It's like the ASEAN Taxonomy. ASEAN Taxonomy was the first transition taxonomy created on a regional basis and it has tiers, a transition tier in particular. For the ASEAN Transition Finance Guidance, we have a gold standard of 1.5 degrees as one tier, a well below two as another tier and a progressing tier. And progressing means it's for people who are not yet at the well below two degree tier but are working towards it and you certainly don't want to sideline them. You want them to be nurtured, to be brought in.
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The second is that we have alternatives for pathways. So we look at the global pathways that are being used, but the question is how do you augment them for Southeast Asia? And we provide ways to augment them in a credible and scientifically supportable manner. We think this contextualization will incentivize more people to come in and create transition plans and more institutions to provide financing.
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Importantly for us also is that trust stakeholder consultations on the transition finance guidance, we found that one of the biggest outcomes of it is that it helps real economy companies create transition plans because then they say, first we didn't know how to do it, then we didn't know where to get the reference pathways from and then we couldn't meet a 1.5, but hey, suddenly there is some regulatory cover that we are able to do this and it's realistic and we think that's credible.
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So, Eugene, looking ahead then, what major shifts or maybe innovations do you see in sustainable finance and how is the Sustainable Finance Institute Asia preparing for the next wave of transformation in this space?
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Well, yeah, just now I mentioned that one of the issues we have with sustainable finance today is that it's really not inclusive enough. So we have a saying in Southeast Asia which is ‘perfect isn't good enough for us anymore’. And obviously if we want change to happen now rather than later when it's too late, we need to be able to be more inclusive with sustainable finance.
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So one of the shifts I think we will see, and we are witnessing elements of this already, is that sustainable finance will become more contextualized. So for instance, what we're seeing with the ASEAN Taxonomy, the ASEAN Transition Finance Guidance, they are starting to become more contextualized to be able to address the needs of the constituents today rather than trying to ask them to be perfect and it cannot be addressed.
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The second is that we will see more shifts into areas which are important but which maybe haven't come to the forefront today and a lot of what we do today is around mitigation but we're forgetting that adaptation is a serious problem as well.
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In Southeast Asia, for instance, in 2020, out of every 100 people, almost three were affected directly by climate change. So they either died, they went missing, or there's a direct impact. In the last six years to 2023, about 44 million children were displaced globally because of climate events and almost 10 million of them came from Philippines, one of our member states. So it is very important that we start to address adaptation because we are in a boat with a leaking hole and water's coming in.
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So there's so much focus on trying to fix a hole, but the water, which is mitigation, and water is actually filling up. Adaptation means that we've got to pour the water out. So that's another area that we have to start looking at. We will also go into other areas like nature, for instance. I think nature finance is very important.
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The way we allocate capital for sustainable finance will also start to change because there's only so much governments can support and if you look at the gap today, it's huge between what the private sector is providing and what the governments are providing and how much more needs to come from the private sector. But a lot of the deals are actually not so easy to fund because the risk-reward profiles need to be augmented.
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So the way we use capital is another aspect that we have to watch for. Perhaps it's not so much direct investments anymore but it could be how we use capital to derisk and leverage and multiply the impact. So this is blended finance, something we hear a lot about, this again, we hope to see more of. And then definitely the use of technology. We see a lot of interesting applications today from drones helping MRV to blockchain, providing credibility to the carbon market, so I think these will be the major shifts that we are going to see.
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There's another topic I would like to address a little bit with you, Eugene, and that is the topic of trust, because that is essential in driving sustainable finance initiatives. How do you ensure that stakeholders across different sectors and countries trust the frameworks and the partnerships spearheaded by the Sustainable Finance Institute Asia?
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Well, as DNV, obviously the value of trust is something that you understand exceptionally well and particularly the assessor role, for instance, where the integrity and the quality of the DNV work is essential. We actually don't so much spearhead projects, but we facilitate and enable projects. And in that role of facilitation and enabling, we focus a lot on what it takes for people to believe in the outcomes of those projects.
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And if I could summarize that, it would be simply the utility and the credibility of whatever the outputs are. And if they trust the utility and the credibility, then it's something that they would use. Now getting to that utility and credibility is very difficult because it means three things. The first is that to be usable, we have to get all the stakeholders to come in and find the common ground for them.
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Because it's always the situation where if you try and please everyone, you go to the lowest common denominator and the lowest common denominator is of no value. So striking that balance again between the different needs as well as a standardized approach is extremely important. The second thing is really for us to have credibility. It needs to be evidence-based, needs to be science-based, it needs to be fact-based, but it also needs to take into account the soft factors because we have to understand different social and political structures that have to be woven in, but that should never undermine the evidence, facts and the science behind it.
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The third is that we have to ensure that there's no undue lobbying that's been woven into that solution. So as a facilitating and enabling platform, these are the things that we try and do to get that trust and credibility out.
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Collaboration between countries is also key to achieving regional sustainability goals. What strategies have you found most effective in fostering strong cross-border partnerships that enable real progress in sustainable finance?
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So we've been really lucky with the ASEAN Taxonomy, which essentially involves all the central banks, capital market regulators, insurance regulators, and ministries of finance. So if you look at us having 10 countries, we'd have around 10 different financial regulators come in. And I have to say that the progress of the work has been astounding.
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In fact, when we first started talking about it, there were many people who reached out to me and said, you'll never get all the 10 countries together to agree on something. They'll have their own domestic focus. But I think the open-mindedness of our member states and the financial regulators, firstly, in trying to reach a regional outcome, and secondly, the understanding that everyone's going to be different because, as I mentioned, there's now different starting points, we have different legacy structures that we have to deal with.
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But at the same time, to achieve that regional ambition, there is a need to come together. A lot of goodwill, a lot of mutual respect for each other and understanding of each other's circumstances help everyone come together and create a solution that was workable. So right now, while our member states may individually have their national taxonomy to address, national interests, national agendas, we do have a common language. We do have an overarching guide and everyone is contributing to it.
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So I think if you talk about collaboration, firstly, you need to have an open mind. You need to have a willingness to cooperate and collaborate. You need to be clear that everyone's going to be different, but we should concentrate on the similarities instead of the differences.
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Yeah, I think what you said there is really critical. Concentrate on what makes us similar rather than what makes us different. We will always be different, but there are many areas, maybe more areas in which we actually are similar and have similar challenges.
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Absolutely, and I think it's also what we want to do together. I will add one more thing to this. As you are bringing in people with very different needs and circumstances, the one size fits all approach doesn't work. So to make collaborations work, you need innovation.
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And maybe one area where there will be quite a bit of innovation is also on digitalization and you touched briefly on it earlier. Digital tools such as artificial intelligence, they are transforming industries, including finance. So if we look at AI integrating this technology with traditional financial systems in Asia presents unique challenges. This is partly due to the region's diverse regulatory environments, of course, but also because of varying degrees of digital infrastructure across the region.
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So how is digitalization reshaping sustainable finance in Asia and what opportunities do you see for technology to drive faster adoption of ESG principles?
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I think it's much more than the average person sees and it's happening at several levels. So firstly, at the real economy level, because if we look at how digitalization is changing the way operations take place, reducing the need for energy through, whether it be IoT or it be AI or just good data management and use. That's one way. So energy usage goes down, emissions go down and we see this in logistics, for instance, where good data is helping plan the routes that trucks take and reducing emissions. We see this in factory processes where we also see reductions.
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But we can also safely say that digitalization helps us get data more cheaply, more efficiently and more accurately and that data can be used to obviously allocate capital better. It can be used in terms of supporting operations as well because you would know exactly where you stand and good data is extremely important. Of course, we do face challenges with data. Sharing the data is one issue and for data to be useful, it needs to be shared and you need to crowd in data.
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So data sovereignty, data ownership, data privacy are issues that we have to deal with and at the same time, I think that the data quality is the biggest issue that we have. So data is going to change the way we are doing things much more significantly in the future. It is already starting to change the way we are doing things. And certainly the transparency that digitalization helps provide in terms of sustainability reporting is going to help do two things. It's going to support informed decision-making for capital allocation and it's going to support stakeholder accountability.
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So, Eugene, as the CEO of Sustainable Finance Institute Asia, you've been at the forefront now of promoting sustainable finance across the region. Can you share how you see the role of sustainable finance evolving in the coming years, particularly in the context of Asia's unique challenges and opportunities?
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When I was a regulator and trying to promote sustainable finance some years back, I was at an event and I'd spoken about sustainable finance and how it was going to be a paradigm shift and someone put his hand up and said, actually, you know, how long do you think sustainable finance will be around for? And I said, probably, you know, less than 20 years. And the guy's utterly stunned and he said, so you're saying this is a fact, you're saying that it's just going to die off after some time.
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And I say actually on the contrary, I'm saying this because it is so important for us to incorporate sustainable finance in all our decision making, our sustainability in all our decision making, that in the end there's no such thing as sustainable finance because every capital allocation decision will incorporate sustainable elements automatically and we don't have to worry about it.
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And of course we're seeing this happen because firstly, the magnitude of the physical events is becoming very apparent to us. The floods, the typhoons, the receding coastlines, the weather changes, food security, it's all becoming very clear. So governments are also starting to take action and we see policy action on this. If governments are failing to take action, what we are also seeing is legal action.
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I'm sure you know about the Woodpecker case. So it's an unborn child, right? And they filed an action on behalf of an unborn child in Korea. So we see victories everywhere from Latin America to Australia. And we also see a more enlightened society, one that wants to change and has the economic means to do it and we see technological advances. So it's all going to be built in at the end of the day. So we will see sustainable finance evolving to a state where all finance has to be sustainable.
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But again, for Southeast Asia, I think the key areas where we'll see evolution is that we will see this incorporated in policy decisions. We already see some of the central banks introducing environmental and social frameworks. We see investors being very judicious in incorporating this but more importantly, we see real economy companies embracing sustainability because firstly, to be relevant in the supply chain, you need to embrace it. And secondly, they themselves are becoming acutely aware of the financial risk to themselves, whether it's through impairment or through stranding, if they don't. And the customers are demanding it.
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So if you see the real economy trying to transform itself, that will be reflected in the way financing is given to them.
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You seem to have quite a positive view on this - quite optimistic for the future. Am I interpreting you correctly, Eugene?
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In view of all the uncertainty and the rapid changes, we have to remain optimistic. But I will say that we have not made a wrong call on this because we don't see this as a trend. We see it as a paradigm shift.
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So back in 2017, when I was part of the ASEAN Capital Markets Forum, which is the grouping of all the capital market regulators in ASEAN, we developed with ICMA, the ASEAN Green Bond Standards, Sustainability Bond Standards and Social Bond Standards, and those were issued through 2017 to 2018. And we wanted these to be really dark green, so it was a separate exercise from creating a transition finance class.
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We had to look at fossil fuels, and many people came out and said to us, this will be a disaster, you won't get any assurances. But we said, no, this is a paradigm shift, and people will recognize that they have to start to decarbonize, they have to start addressing the SDGs. Today, that's about 52 billion of issuances which are clearly labelled using these standards. So we do see that shift.
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Now the momentum is going in the right direction.
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Finally, Eugene, there's one topic that is very important me and I'm sure it's important to you as well and that is our future leaders. So as the landscape of sustainable finance continues to evolve, what key lessons have you learned that future leaders should keep in mind and what advice would you offer to those that are looking to drive innovation and create lasting impact in this particular space?
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Right. You really hit the nail on the head when you said lasting impact and innovation because we are really in a situation where you don't have a lot of certainty. You don't have precedence to rely on because this is so new, right? It's a real challenge to all of us. So firstly, innovation is extremely important and risk taking. I mentioned risk taking just now because to innovate you must be taking risks.
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And a lot of the solutions that we believed in in the past, the one size fits all solutions don't work anymore because we are talking about the welfare of the citizens of individual countries. Maybe a good example is the ASEAN taxonomy. So we have 10 countries as I shared with you with very different circumstances.
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How do you create a common taxonomy for them? And the conventional wisdom was always, find the right benchmark, find the right benchmark that can fit everybody. But if you are facing that sort of divergence, there is no one single benchmark. So the ASEAN taxonomy then innovates through providing up to three tiers for each economy activity, rather than just a one tier being a binary taxonomy.
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That's innovation, that's also risk taking, that's also changing the rules. And if we want to be inclusive, we want to be effective, and we want timeliness, we have to do this. The second thing I will say is that we have to recognize and fully internalize the differences of the different stakeholders and what it means to them and we have to be able to find a common ground that's effective and again innovation helps drive that. The third is you have to be patient but at the same time realize that there is an urgency to the agenda and lastly acceptance that this is not going to be a walk in the park from the minute you start is critical.
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Wise words, Eugene. So, Eugene, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. It's been a pleasure to learn about the transformation in the world of sustainable finance and the industries in which you work and the ways your leadership is fostering innovation and collaboration. So we truly appreciate your time and expertise with us here today.
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You've been listening to Trust and transformations - leaders navigating change, a DNV podcast. Head to DNV.com to hear more episodes of Trust and transformations or subscribe on your favourite podcast platform so you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.
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