Benelux roundtable: summary

ecolytiq hosted its very first Benelux roundtable in November 2023, bringing together key leaders of the Dutch banking world, including ABN Amro Bank, ING, Rabobank, Triodos Bank and Visa. The teams discussed challenges, opportunities and next steps in driving sustainability in banking experiences for Dutch consumers. Let’s dive into the insights and key takeaways from the session.   

The challenge:   

64% of consumers think that financial institutions have a key role to play in promoting sustainable living and conscious consumerism (Source: PA Consulting). Yet nearly half of them (43%) don’t trust that sustainable finance products do anything meaningful (Source: PA Consulting). Additionally, Dutch consumers are hesitant to embrace sustainability due to 'lack of trust in carbon footprint data' (Deloitte). This also goes for climate engagement providers.   

Climate engagement providers are all part of the problem: for the same purchase, consumers receive differing carbon data calculations, depending on the provider.   And with only 5 years & 256 days left to act to keep global warming below 1.5°C, the sustainable banking world really needs to collaborate and an align on methodologies. The aim of the roundtable, hosted by ecolytiq, was to bring the key financial players in the Dutch market together, to discuss, align and lead the topic of driving sustainability in banking experiences in the Netherlands and become the world’s first pilot on the topic.  

The discussion:   

The willingness to act and collaborate was the main theme of the roundtable. Already early on in the conversation, the banks highlighted, that their main goals for joining the roundtable included: 

• Gather learnings from each other
• Discuss best practices on the topic of sustainable banking and climate engagement 
• Create consistency among methodologies for sustainable experiences in banking.
• Understanding customer demands and how to achieve them 
• Exploring how the Dutch banking industry can lead the sustainability transition. 

These initial thoughts further shaped the conversation around three overarching questions:   

• What are your thoughts on an alignment of methodology?
• What is currently holding us back in aligning our methodologies? 
• What do we need to do to move forward?  

The market potential if all banks and climate engagement providers in the Netherlands work together is huge and the discussions also made clear that both banks and governments need to be involved in the sustainability transition.   Whilst we are now all collecting our thoughts and undertaking the necessary measures to turn our vision into fruition, we will keep you updated on our next steps, so stay tuned!  

Watch the recap video here:

‍