🏠︎ | Past Sessions | Sustainable Finance Uncovered, Five Things You’re Probably Overlooking
- Event: Finance Forum 25
- Date: 7 October 2025
- Speaker: Marco DeBenedictis, Head of Sustainable Finance – UK Corporate Bank, Barclays Investment Bank
- Estimated read time: 8-9 minutes
Quick summary
This session reframed sustainable finance as a core finance discipline, not a reporting or branding exercise.
The central message was that sustainability risk now sits inside energy usage, supply chains, capital allocation, and client exposure, not just ESG disclosures. Many of the biggest risks are invisible to traditional finance processes because they sit outside budgets, procurement logic, or risk heat maps.
The discussion pushed finance leaders to treat sustainability as infrastructure, incentives, and underwriting. From AI energy demand to supplier finance and client transition risk, the overlooked issues are practical, behavioural, and increasingly financial in impact.
Sustainable finance has moved from optics to underwriting
The session opened with a clear repositioning. Sustainability is no longer about narrative or moral positioning. It is about whether business models remain viable as energy demand, regulation, and capital pricing shift.
Rather than revisiting climate targets or temperature thresholds, the focus moved to infrastructure reality. Power, water, grids, and supply chains now determine whether sustainability strategies hold up under scrutiny.
For finance leaders, this marks a shift from disclosure to decision support. The question is no longer whether sustainability matters, but where it sits in capital allocation and risk management.
AI is a sustainability decision whether you label it or not
One of the most striking insights was the link between AI adoption and energy demand. AI was framed not as a lightweight software layer, but as an energy intensive system with material power and water requirements.
Training and daily use of large language models were compared to major renewable assets in scale. The implication was blunt. AI programmes that do not underwrite their electricity and water needs are incomplete investments.
This creates a paradox. AI is one of the most powerful optimisation tools available, but also one of the hungriest loads on the grid. Treating AI systems as implicit power purchase obligations forces earlier scrutiny of long term cost, resilience, and feasibility.
“If you haven’t underwritten the megawatts and the water that is required, you haven’t done AI.” Marco DeBenedictis, Head of Sustainable Finance – UK Corporate Bank, Barclays Investment Bank
Procurement is the real decarbonisation engine
The session challenged a common assumption that sustainability lives with communications or brand teams. In reality, most emissions sit upstream in supply chains.
Scope three emissions were described as materially larger than operational emissions and increasingly subject to assurance. As regulation tightens, sustainability performance becomes an auditable finance issue rather than a voluntary disclosure.
The practical takeaway was simple. If sustainability is not embedded in purchase orders, it does not exist in the footprint. Procurement decisions, not PR campaigns, determine outcomes.
For finance leaders, this elevates supplier data, traceability, and scorecards. Carbon and water intensity begin to carry financial weight alongside cost and reliability.
Treasury can move behaviour faster than targets
Long term targets struggle to change behaviour. Financial incentives do.
The session positioned sustainable supply chain finance as one of the most powerful tools available to treasury teams. By linking pricing, payment terms, or access to liquidity to specific behaviours, organisations can influence suppliers at scale.
This approach relies on well established behavioural dynamics. Near term incentives tend to outweigh distant commitments. Discounts today matter more than targets decades away.
Sustainable supply chain finance reframes decarbonisation as a commercial proposition, rewarding progress through cheaper funding rather than relying on moral pressure.
“An incentive now will beat a 2050 sermon.” Marco DeBenedictis, Head of Sustainable Finance – UK Corporate Bank, Barclays Investment Bank
ESG belongs on the risk heat map
A recurring theme was that ESG is not philanthropy. It is enterprise risk management.
Climate exposure, regulatory change, and transition risk increasingly affect cash flows, asset values, and cost of capital. In that context, sustainability risk belongs alongside FX, cyber, and liquidity on the risk heat map.
Behavioural biases can delay action. Organisations often overspend on communications and underspend on prevention. Over time, the cost reappears through insurance premiums, compliance burdens, and higher capital costs.
The framing was pragmatic. If finance teams already hedge currency risk, they can also price climate risk.
“If you can hedge currency risk, you can hedge climate risk, but you should start pricing both.” Marco DeBenedictis, Head of Sustainable Finance, UK Corporate Bank, Barclays Investment Bank
Your client and supplier base can store hidden transition risk
Sustainability exposure does not stop at internal operations. Client and supplier portfolios can create material downstream risk.
As assured reporting expands and mechanisms such as carbon border adjustments apply, emissions intensive counterparties can affect margins and future revenue. This pushes ESG screening into mainstream financial control.
The session emphasised stress testing. Understanding how clients and suppliers will adapt their asset bases becomes part of forward looking risk assessment. Sustainability linked covenants, screening frameworks, and transition planning move from optional to expected.
In this context, traditional KYC processes evolve towards a broader understanding of carbon exposure across the value chain.
What good looks like, practical actions finance leaders can take now
This session translated into concrete actions rather than abstract principles.
Questions to ask this quarter- Have AI investments been assessed for long term power and water demand
- Are procurement decisions explicitly pricing carbon, water, and traceability
- Is treasury using incentives to influence supplier behaviour
- Does sustainability risk appear on the same risk heat map as FX and cyber
- How exposed is the client and supplier base to transition pressure
- Rising energy and data centre costs linked to digital programmes
- Increased audit and assurance requirements for scope three emissions
- Differentiation in cost of capital between resilient and exposed business models
- Procurement conversations shifting from cost only to resilience and traceability
- Treating sustainability as a reporting layer rather than an operating issue
- Announcing AI capability without underwriting infrastructure
- Assuming targets alone will change behaviour
- Leaving client and supplier exposure untested
What good looks like in practice
Finance teams integrate sustainability into capital allocation, risk assessment, and commercial decision making. Energy, water, and transition risk are priced early, not explained later. Treasury and procurement become tools for change, not afterthoughts.
Conclusion, sustainability is a finance operating model shift
The session’s most useful framing was that sustainability has been misunderstood because it was treated as a moral science. In reality, the overlooked issues are behavioural and financial.
Sustainable finance is about incentives, infrastructure, and risk pricing. Less rhetoric, more underwriting. As these pressures intensify, finance leaders who integrate sustainability into decision making will be better positioned to protect value and support resilient growth.
Key takeaways
- Sustainable finance is moving from disclosure to underwriting and risk pricing
- AI adoption carries material energy and water implications
- Procurement and treasury drive outcomes more than communications
- ESG belongs on the enterprise risk heat map
- Client and supplier exposure can store hidden transition risk
Speaker
Head of Sustainable Finance, UK Corporate Bank, Barclays Investment Bank. Leads sustainable finance integration across corporate banking, covering lending, structuring, and sustainability risk.