Last week, our CEO, Rupert Bull, joined an expert panel at Reset Connect’s Finance & Investment Stage for “Banking on Sustainability: Turning Responsibility into Opportunity.”
He was joined by Heather Buchanan of Bankers for Net Zero, Mike Clark of Ario Advisory, and Russell Bishop, Head of Sustainable Finance Policy at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).
Reset Connect is the UK’s leading sustainability event, and this year’s Finance & Investment Stage lived up to its billing — bringing together thousands of business leaders, investors, policymakers and innovators across two days at ExCeL London.
The Question Everyone Came Back To
The panel tackled one of the most pressing questions in sustainable finance right now: how do banks actually turn decarbonisation commitments into action, when the data they need simply doesn’t exist?
It’s a question we think about every day at The Disruption House — and one we heard echoed throughout the event, not just on the Finance & Investment Stage.
For most private companies in the UK with turnover between £2m and £100m, sustainability reporting is fragmented and far from streamlined. That leaves banks unable to credibly assess the climate and transition risk sitting inside their SME portfolios — risk that regulators, investors and internal committees are increasingly demanding answers on.
A Challenge That Doesn’t Stop at Banking
What became clear across conversations at our stand is that this isn’t only a banking problem.
- Insurers are pricing and managing climate-related exposure across commercial portfolios without consistent, comparable data on how those clients manage environmental risk
- Corporates are being asked to verify supply chain resilience for procurement and screening, but can only answer that question if the underlying data exists
- Across every sector we spoke to, the same blind spot kept surfacing: not a lack of information, but a lack of structure
What This Means Going Forward
The conversations at Reset Connect reinforced something we see in our work every day: the data gap isn’t a compliance footnote. It’s a fundamental risk management problem sitting at the centre of lending, underwriting and procurement decisions.
Closing the Gap
For banks, the Climate Action platform offers a proven digital infrastructure for scalable SME engagement and standardised sustainability reporting. For insurers and corporates, our public disclosure analysis profiles thousands of unlisted companies from publicly available information — no surveys required.
It was great to spend two days discussing this with banks, insurers and corporates who stopped by our stand.
Thank you to everyone who joined us — the data gap is closing.
