London-based lender Standard Chartered Bank has appointed Marisa Drew from Credit Suisse as chief sustainability officer.
Drew moves to her new role after more than 18 years with the Zurich-headquartered investment bank, where she was chief sustainability officer and global head of sustainability strategy, advisory and finance.
She is StanChart’s first CSO.
She takes on the job of chairing StanChart’s group sustainability forum, running its sustainable finance teams, and leading the bank’s decarbonisation drive. The emerging markets-focused company declared in October that it would be a net-zero emissions bank by 2050.
Drew will report to the chief executive of StanChart’s corporate, commercial and institutional banking arm, Simon Cooper. She will start at the end of February and will be based in London.
She joins StanChart as the bank faces scrutiny for undermining its carbon-reduction commitments by financing fossil fuels projects, including a natural gas facility in Western Australia. StanChart was also called out in January for labelling a bond for a company building a coal terminal in India “sustainable” and for backing a credit facility for Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company.
The bank told Eco-Business that Drew’s role will involve engaging with local and global stakeholders and “working collaboratively with them towards the common agenda of mobilising capital towards sustainable solutions.”
Drew said a statement that she was looking forward to joining an organisation “with such a deep institutional commitment to sustainability.”
StanChart’s sustainability commitments include working on a taskforce to set standards for global carbon markets, which is chaired by Bill Winters, StanChart’s chief executive.
Drew joins in the same month that Tracy Wong Harris was appointed to lead StanChart’s Hong Kong-based Asia sustainable finance team.
At Credit Suisse, Drew led the strategy for creating sustainable investment products for the bank’s institutional and corporate clients. She set up the company’s impact advisory and finance department. Before joining Credit Suisse, Drew worked for Merrill Lynch and Kidder Peabody.
