Linda Recupero, EVP Public affairs , HSBC USA - “It’s Not Easy Being Green”

HSBC has been involved in corporate stewardship for a long time, and has a lot of green initiatives for some time now. She joked about being green and banks having a lot of green (money), but there is a belief that they should be environmentally green and believe it from every aspect of them as an organization.

Their core beliefs and strategic initiatives include corporate responsibility. They want to be one of the world’s leading brands for corporate responsibility and thus reduce their environmental footprint.

They look at their stakeholders with an environmental stewardship lens. There are a lot of people to consider. Their business and communications perspective. They want to engage customers in an emotional relationship and then having a positive sustainable impact on the communities where they work. There tag line, “The World’s Local Bank” and the fact tha HSBC is the 3rd largest banking organization in the world, this message rings true for them as well. For HSBC, environmental stewardship is central to who they
are.

Great focus on engaging their clients and customers, but the slides were not terribly engaging. Rather dull, which is something she even stated when she considered her slides compared to the National Geographic ones that preceded here work.

Rather than write a big check, they are trying to have policies and initiatives that support their work and mission. They encourage their employees to be active and engaged in nature conservation programs.

They focus on partnering with other organizations, and partnered in the WWF and EarthWatch. They then wanted to fund organizations that were focused on climate changed. The HSBC Climate Partneship was with four credible organizations–The Climate Group, Earthwatch, WWF, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. They funded this 5-year program with $100
M and want to encourage long-term work and involvement with people to be on expeditions and research projects.

They have the first Gold LEED certified bank branch in Greece, NY. Moving forward, they want every branch to have a component of being green and reducing their footprint.

Another of their tag lines for one of their campaigns is “there’s no small change” www.theresnosmallchange.com, which has incentives for making small changes in people’s banking and personal lives support these efforts.

It seems HSBC is very active in this area, and I am glad to hear it. I had no idea they were doing to much, so from a corporate communication perspective, they are quite active. As an organization with their people and customers and consumers and facilities, they are really making strides toward following their mission. Their chairman, Stephen K. Green, promotes this and believes and espouses promoting the green movement within HSBC.

The questions once again came from a global audience. The first question was about that most people are probably not aware of all the work HSBC is doing within this space. The question is about how HSBC can promote itself as a green-focused firm, and how they can use that within their marketing efforts. They are planning to actively begin marketing their work, especially as they are somewhat new at marketing and promoting their CR and Philanthropy and PR groups. They now realize how important this message and
the PR can be (compared to their marketing efforts). They have been humble and quiet in the past, and now are becoming more proactive in their approach. There was another question about how to filer this CR and green message to filer down, especially when the CEO is already in favor or and an evangelist of this message. A big piece of this is within employee education and e-learning and individual employee goals. They encourage people to be involved in conferences, and have a sustainability officer who then promotes
this and working with outside groups. Another question is if they have done a sustainability report, which they did. She believed this is critical, and they just released their report a month ago and offered to get it to the questioner (yet, oddly, did not share any of the results with those of us here).

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