Ask a relationship manager when they last used a climate risk dashboard, and most will
tell you: never. Not because they don’t care, but because the data lives somewhere
else entirely.
It sits in a sustainability team’s spreadsheet, or a PDF report commissioned once a
year. By the time it might matter to a credit conversation, it’s stale, disconnected, or
simply never reaches the person actually pricing the loan.
That disconnect is becoming a real business problem. According to a recent industry
analysis of SME banking, banks are being told to empower relationship managers with
digital tools and sector-specific intelligence, restructuring teams so that risk and
analytics sit alongside the people holding the client relationship, not behind them.
The Data Isn’t Missing. It’s Misplaced.
Most banks have already invested heavily in sustainability and climate data. The
problem isn’t a lack of information, it’s where that information lives.
- Climate and transition data sits with sustainability or ESG teams, often reporting
into risk or compliance functions. - Relationship managers work from credit memos, pricing models and portfolio
reviews, none of which typically carry that data. - By the time a transition risk score reaches a lending decision, it has usually been
manually re-entered, summarised, or dropped altogether.
The result is two parallel conversations that never quite meet: one about sustainability,
and one about credit.
Supervisors are no longer treating this as a reporting nicety. The Bank of England’s
SS5/25 explicitly raises the bar on climate risk data, expecting banks to show it shapes
real decisions, not just a compliance appendix.
At the same time, SME lending itself is under pressure. Fintechs and platform lenders
are winning relationships by embedding data directly into the moment of commercial
action, the point where a decision is actually made. Banks that keep climate data siloed
in a separate team risk losing exactly that moment, both to regulators and to
competitors.
What Needs to Change
Closing this gap doesn’t mean asking relationship managers to become sustainability
analysts. It means giving them structured, sector-benchmarked transition data inside
the tools they already use, at the point they’re already making a decision.
That’s precisely the gap the Climate Action platform, developed and deployed by
NatWest and National Australia Bank, was built to close. Built on TDH’s underlying
sustainability intelligence, it turns SME transition and emissions data into a format
relationship managers can act on directly, alongside the credit metrics they already
use.
What This Means for Banks
Climate data has value only when it reaches the point of decision. A sustainability team
holding excellent data is not the same as a relationship manager acting on it.
Banks that solve this now build climate risk into everyday credit conversations, ahead
of the regulatory curve and ahead of competitors still treating it as a separate
workstream.
Talk to Our Team
Curious what climate-usable data looks like inside a real credit conversation? Talk to
The Disruption House about how the Climate Action platform brings transition data
directly to your relationship managers
