Awards for Excellence 2018
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When Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Asia president, Matthew Koder, gets going on corporate responsibility, your best chance of getting out of the room within an hour and a half is an earthquake. Koder chose to pitch personally in only one category, this one, and in truth everything BAML put in for – investment banking, transaction services and country awards from the Philippines to Japan – is presented through the filter of corporate responsibility.
The commitment starts from within – and to a truly exhaustive degree. We now know what proportion of BAML’s carpets in Asia Pacific are recycled (31% of 900 metric tonnes) and the proportion of Apac employees who had their bins removed in 2017 (43%, not always without protest). When BAML got a number on waste to landfill tonnage in India that looked too good to be true, it had it independently audited and then published the true, worse figure, wanting accuracy over good PR.
Besides the increasingly common tales of monitoring individual printer use and making people walk to recycle bins, the bank does appear genuine in its work on gender equality and the support of LGBT employees, using an ally system that gained new chapters in China, India and Korea last year, alongside the introduction of transgender benefits in India, Singapore and Hong Kong. It is also a leader in disability advocacy.
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| Matthew Koder |
Having the bank’s own house in order is important, but BAML also stands out for its work in local communities, with priorities including economic mobility for women in India, alleviating hunger in the region and work on water access projects alongside Water.org. The bank provided $7.5 million in grants to 47 NGOs in 12 Asia-Pacific countries in 2017 and employees volunteered 23,000 hours across the region (actually a little slender compared to 2 million hours globally), but individual stories are more compelling than numbers.
The bank is also a leader in green bonds, both globally and in Asia.Asia environmental, social and governance head Melissa Moi could recite dozens of them verbatim, but one great example is the One Home One Toilet project from Shelter Associates, one of BAML’s grant recipients in India. It is so simple: millions in India live in slums with no access to basic sanitation, but in many cases there are sewage pipes right underneath them that they just cannot access. So the charity uses Geographic Information System technology and Google Earth to map drainage lines, links the slums into the existing infrastructure and, by doing so, has already mapped 225,000 households in slums and built 12,500 household toilets across Maharashtra state.
