Awards for Excellence 2018
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.