Prudential regulation

• The RegTech Insight Awards APAC acknowledge top providers of RegTech solutions that have effectively enhanced firms' ability to meet increasingly complex regulatory requirements in the financial services industry across the region.
• "As regulators around the globe continue to step up their scrutiny, businesses need to implement cutting-edge employee compliance solutions to strengthen oversight of their personnel and build a culture of compliance," said Jennifer Sun, CEO of StarCompliance.
• Its Accountability & Competency solution suite allows users to effectively demonstrate compliance with global individual accountability regimes.
• It provides a clear, accurate accountability trail for both internal and external purposes, with access to all individual accountability compliance information via a single integrated platform.

• Assured Guaranty UK Limited (AGUK)* announced that it has guaranteed principal and interest payments on £140 million of primary wrapped bonds issued by Heathrow Airport, the UK’s largest airport.
• There are two fixed rate tranches of wrapped bonds, a £70 million tranche due 2058 and a £70 million tranche due 2059.
• "We are delighted to have worked alongside the Heathrow Airport team supporting the airport’s long term funding requirements by providing Assured Guaranty’s financial guarantee.
• Both AGUK and AGM are subsidiaries of Assured Guaranty Ltd. (AGL and, together with its subsidiaries, Assured Guaranty).

• This article is part of a series by The Conversation, Getting to Zero, examining Australia’s energy transition.
• Just north of Jamestown in South Australia, 70 kilometres east of the Spencer Gulf and next to a wind farm of nearly 100 turbines, stands the world’s first big battery.
• Australia aspires not only to transition its economy to net zero emissions, but to become a green energy superpower.

The size of the green finance challenge

• These financial flows need to grow by 21% a year, on average.
• Without this enormous increase, the economic transition will not happen in time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
• Successive Australian governments have been slow to grasp this reality, and we are now playing catch-up with many other countries.

Australia releases its strategy

• The Australian government’s Sustainable Finance Strategy, released by Treasurer Jim Chalmers last Thursday, lays solid foundations for this recovery.
• Yet more needs to be done if Australia is to achieve the strategy’s stated ambition to be a global sustainability finance leader.
• The strategy is arranged around three core pillars.
• Read more:
  How to beat 'rollout rage': the environment-versus-climate battle dividing regional Australia

  Large companies will also be required to disclose their net zero transition plan, if they have one.

Fighting greenwashing

• ASIC Deputy Chair Karen Chester believes the economic cost and loss of investor confidence caused by greenwashing “cannot be overstated”.
• Her organisation has set out guidelines to help financial institutions identify it.
• These bonds are designed to establish standards for lending and borrowing for all green finance; they will also help the government to fund projects such as electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

What’s missing from the strategy?

• And Australia ranks only 30th in a list of countries on its share of talent for green finance.
• If the financing of the transition were a bicycle race, Australia has now caught up to the global peloton.

Alison Atherton is a member of the Australian Sustainable Finance Institute's Capability Reference Group Gordon Noble does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• This press release is not being, and must not be, sent to shareholders with registered addresses in a Restricted Jurisdiction.
• Any investment activity to which this announcement relates will only be available to and will only be engaged with relevant persons.
• Any person who is not a relevant person should not act or rely on this announcement or any of its contents.
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