Finance consulting and its role in shaping the future of green finance

Summary 

While the conversation around sustainability has reached a fever pitch in recent years, so have the measures employed to facilitate this shift. 

Green finance is one such measure that supports projects that are dedicated to creating more positive environmental outcomes. Companies must rush to react to this shift and ensure that their organisation is prepared to rise to the challenge of a greener future, swiftly. 

Here is why financial advisory may be the key to achieving this goal.

How it delivers swift results: It is not enough for a company to set greener goals. Sustainability must be embedded within a business model in order to drive and meet the priorities and standards set by industry leaders and large companies. 

This requires sweeping changes across the board and transformation from the ground up. A finance consultant provides the expertise, experience, and perspective to drive this change on an accelerated timeline not just to implement these changes but to create a higher ROI on a shorter timeline. 

Why companies must consider advisory: Specialised consulting helps a business respond to all its priorities simultaneously without compromising on quality or productivity. 

It also helps a company meet its short and long-term objectives and meet the demands of the market in order to remain competitive throughout its green transformation.

Greener business processes have become a pervasive topic in the current business landscape. It almost feels as if the words used to describe the different activities that support environmentalism have become overused.

Despite this, however, it is clear that dramatic action needs to be taken on an accelerated timeline; understanding the many ways through which this can be done is critical. This means that the words used to describe these activities must become strategic actions that don’t just drive the values of a company, but the business model as a whole. 

Green finance is one facet to a more sustainable future. Simply put, it refers to any financial structure or activity that is geared towards producing better environmental outcomes.

This is a necessary venture, to say the least, and various international players think so too. 

The European Central Bank, for instance, has invested heavily in green finance (with the World Economic Forum having lauded it on its ability to help with COVID-19 relief), and the United States, China, and France are the world’s top three issuers of green bonds. These mechanisms encourage greener projects and help minimise the climate impact of other projects. 

Here in Europe, green practices have an increasingly notable role in legislative and economic decisions as well. 

All these ultimately play into the estimate that by 2023, the green bond market could potentially be worth as much as $2.36 trillion.  

This is a great sign of a greener future. It also indicates better overall health across all businesses, the global economy, and global communities. What this also signifies, however, is that a company must adjust to these changes responsively.

How finance consulting delivers swift results

For many years, phrases like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was the umbrella term through which companies engaged in more sustainable, eco-friendly activities.

Over time, as environmental consciousness became a pressing necessity and a cause for concern, CSR turned into simple corporate sustainability. A requirement across the board for all companies, industries, nations, and individuals.  

Even while the term itself became shorter, however, the expectations only expanded with this shift.

It is not enough for a company to have sustainability goals because the environment, itself, has long surpassed the point at which mere goals and milestones can reverse corporate impact. 

Modern businesses must have sustainability embedded in their business model. 

When this is the case, every project and activity a company takes on will automatically serve the ultimate sustainability mission.  

To reach this point, however, your business will need to invest a great deal of time and effort. Transformation that begins with the business model means sweeping changes across the board, and this is not always easy to do.

That is where finance consulting makes its value clear. 

Finance consulting brings specialisation, financial expertise, thorough knowledge of the market and the global climate, digitalisation, external perspective, and experience—all of which they leverage to help your company undergo the necessary transformation. 

This makes change, on a much more drastic and larger scale, more possible and within reach of your business processes. 

On top of making this transformation more accessible, it also makes it possible for these changes to drive results on an accelerated timeline. 

The right finance consulting services can, in short, drive higher ROI sooner, so that your company can enjoy a stable financial foundation even as you transform from the ground up.

Why companies should consider financial advisory

The challenges a business must respond to in the current landscape are numerous.

While sustainability is a major goal that green finance supports, there are other crises and challenges that can throw a business off course or create more short-term priorities that require swift responsiveness. 

Navigating this path while attempting to stay on track to achieving growth objectives appears impossible. 

The need for sustainability, and indeed the need to respond to all these pressures simultaneously, however, is necessary. Just because another priority appears in the midst of your organisation’s path to sustainability does not mean that all other priorities fade away.  

A company needs to be able to balance all these factors, which means that it must still meet the, often unsustainable, demands of the same market as before.

Even if the long-term view looks greener, a company must be able to survive in the short term, which means change must occur without disrupting the ecosystem of a business. 
Financial advisory enables transformation with an eye on a company’s long and short-term objectives. They are also a one-stop solution to help companies leverage the tools and resources to facilitate a sustainable shift to greener operations. They can equip a company with everything from finance outsourcing and digitalisation to the relevant training programmes and cost optimisation strategies.

Prepare for the future of finance 

For the global landscape to become more sustainable, all businesses must become more sustainable. 

The practices that drive environmental consciousness, however, still remain largely inaccessible to small and medium-sized enterprises. This is due to the higher production costs associated with more conscious production and the many other crises SMEs must respond to in order to stay afloat. 

As more companies dedicate themselves to sustainability and green finance, however, the more accessible sustainability frameworks will become to the industries and economies around the world.

Now is the time to lead the way to a more conscious, greener future for finance with the support of cutting-edge financial consulting.