“The financial sector is lagging behind”

“It’s all about trust”, states Wijffels. Five years from now, the financial sector should have moved to really understanding what financing a sustainable economy means. It means changing products, changing the way you think about them. “We need different profiles of payback systems and maturities”, he explains. The move to a sustainable financial system is not just something that is desirable, it is a necessity. “We are now at a point in time where past experiences are not really relevant any more for what’s ahead of us. Investing in products that are not sustainable in the long run is not viable any more.” According to him, the financial sector is drastically lagging behind other industries. Bankers and other financial professionals need to really start understanding the implications of our necessity to move towards a sustainable economy. “We really have to look at what will be sustainable in the long run and where we run less risk in calculating with sustainability issues in our credit decisions”, Wijffels concludes his FSinsight interview.

In the past Herman Wijffels also worked as a board member and chairman at the Rabobank, and as chairman of the Dutch Social-Economic Council (SER).

References

This article may be reproduced according to our terms of use with attribution (and link, if online) to www.tias.edu. To be cited as: ““The financial sector is lagging behind””, Herman Wijffels, www.tias.edu, November 29, 2011.

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Audio transcript (mp3)
Low-res video (mp4)
Profile Herman Wijffels (Worldconnectors)