- Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, has partnered with Google to finance fast-growing climate technology firms.
- HSBC’s finance will help those partners scale their businesses, and then HSBC will help customers access all this innovation.
Britain’s biggest bank, HSBC, has partnered with Google to finance fast-growing climate technology firms behind some of the world’s most promising solutions to global climate change.
HSBC will look to provide financing to companies cherry-picked by the US technology giant to join its Google Cloud Ready-Sustainability programme under the terms of the partnership,
Justin Keeble, managing director for global sustainability at Google Cloud, said that companies want to accelerate the delivery of their sustainability goals. But there is a degree of confusion as to which solutions out there are going to help solve their problems.
HSBC’s finance will help those partners scale their businesses, and then HSBC will help customers access all this innovation.
Martin Richards, global head of climate tech and sustainable finance at HSBC, said Google’s due diligence provided “a certain comfort” that complemented the bank’s assessment of potential new ‘venture debt deals – where a lender offers debt financing for inherently riskier companies.
Scaling technologies that can help the corporate world move more quickly to a low-carbon economy dominated the COP28 climate talks in Dubai in December and is a crucial part of most banks’ efforts to drive a global push to cut emissions. But finance to the sector fell sharply in 2023, PwC data shows, as investors and lenders fret about risk.