Integrating learning from the Climate Safe Lending Fellowship across M&T bank

The Climate Safe Lending Fellowship is a six-month leadership programme designed to equip professionals working within banking to drive their organisation’s transition to climate-safe lending.

With this year’s programme in full swing, Co-Lead Natalie Tucker recently caught up with Fellows Asa Guilamo, Marianne Tyree and Jessica Cowperthwait - all from M&T Bank in the USA - to hear about their experience of going through the programme alongside colleagues. 

Natalie Tucker (NT): What’s the focus of your work and what brought you to the Fellowship?

Asa Guilamo, Head of Climate Strategy (AG): The conversation and action around ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) is relatively new at our bank and we thought the Fellowship would help us to learn from best practice, leapfrog through the process, and stand a better chance of getting it right first time. I wanted to do the Fellowship alongside colleagues because I work in ESG, and we need climate intrapreneurs outside of ESG - the best solutions will be ones we come up with together.

Jessica Cowperthwait, SVP, Strategic Initiatives Expert (JC): My work is future-looking and data-oriented, with a particular focus on commercial real estate. It’s about looking at the way that we process and underwrite loans, and bringing ourselves into a more automated and aggregated space - and ESG fits into that because as risk profiles change, the bank needs to stay flexible and responsive to changing markets.

Marianne Tyree, SVP, Senior Credit Officer (MT): I am a commercial credit officer, primarily focused on commercial real estate. Over the last 12-18 months, alongside Jessica, I’ve been involved in revamping and changing how we look at some of our credit processes. We recognize that ESG needs to be a part of those decisions in order for the bank to accomplish its goals.

NT: How are you coming together around the Fellowship and what benefits are you finding in that?

MT: We come together as a working group biweekly. When we meet after sessions to discuss what we learnt, I find it really interesting that we’ll all have picked up on different things - I’ll automatically go to “so what does that mean for credit risk?” whereas Jessica and Asa will have different takeaways and reactions.

JC: I completely agree - I think those conversations, where we can relate the content to what we’re working on today, tomorrow, next month and so on, is another level which really adds value on top of the programme content. Climate-safe lending is such a big topic, so breaking it down together makes it more digestible and applicable in my daily role.

NT: How are you finding learning alongside peers from other banks?

MT: I found it interesting being in this cohort that despite the variances in bank size, location, and point in time in the journey, the key changes which Fellows are working towards all seem to boil down to the idea of “how do you influence changes in mindset?”. I find that encouraging - even though we're farther behind some of the global banks in our ESG actions, we're not unique. Another advantage for us is that we don’t just have one learning partner, we actually have three. We’ve met up with each of our learning partners as a trio, so we’re all benefiting from more perspectives from across the cohort.

NT: And how is the Fellowship helping you in your climate work so far?

JC: I think one obvious benefit is the connections and what I’m learning from my peers - other Fellows who are further along on their journeys. It’s also kickstarted the relationship between the three of us, and looking at things through an ESG lens.

AG: For me, using generative questions – open-ended questions which encourage deeper thinking and invite descriptive answers – has been an actionable tool. ESG is not the ESG team’s to own by ourselves - we need everyone to take part, so we should probably use questions 90% of the time to be able to get to that space where we're not a small silo, but we’re sourcing ideas from everywhere and we have an ESG mindset integrated across the bank.

MT:  I think being involved in this work whilst also being involved in setting up other initiatives is allowing me to think about them at the same time. For example: How can we leverage what we're learning through the Fellowship in the work that the bank’s doing? It’s allowing us to build ESG at the time we build out other processes.

AG: ESG isn’t a separate business line, it needs to be part of more or less every business line - but as this is relatively new to us, more stakeholders in the bank need a climate crash course or a climate 101 - we’re thinking about how we can reach other parts of the business with what we’re learning, so being able to go through the Fellowship and digest it between the three of us first is golden. We're just excited about where we will be when this ends in June considering the steps we've taken already! 

Find out more about the Climate Safe Lending Fellowship here, or read about key lessons from the 2021 Fellowship in our report “Catalysing bank climate action: Lessons from the inside”.