Why Sustainable Banking Matters at Stanford

At Stanford University, in the Engineering School, and in the d.school (Design School), and in the Law School’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy & Finance, in the Graduate School of Business, and nearly all parts of the campus, sustainability matters.

Stanford is buzzing with students and faculty creating next-generation energy, construction, transportation, food, housing and other solutions that extend the lifecycle of resources used by our generation, and steward resources for future generations.

Designing solutions that repurpose the built environment and respect Nature’s own design quest to add resiliency that mitigates climate and other conditions is admirable.  In their own expert and innovative ways, biomimicry writ large.

Whither the bankers?  Where liveth they?  Harken the bankers back to a world underwriting to profit capital by destroying human or natural capital?  Is the legacy of un-sustainability banking – even digitized to nanosecond trading efficiency – the best that can be innovated?

In order to redesign sustainable cities and businesses, the banks that hold our deposits and create the rules for lending capital must understand sustainability, and must evolve to create Sustainable Banking that keeps the bank safe as an institution, keeps the customer of the bank safe throughout their personal or business lifecycle, and keeps the regions impacted and their quality of life safe.

When the Stanford graduates with sustainability ideas and business plans tucked into their gaps and gowns can show up in a bank and have a banker reward the startup business for adding sustainability, the banks will be safer, and make regional  of life safer, for all.

Through an active collaboration with Stanford, Urban Logic is pushing forward a Sustainable Banking Affiliates Program, and more:  Check out – SustainableBanking.Stanford.edu.

Bruce Cahan

Bruce Cahan is CEO and co-founder of Urban Logic, a nonprofit that harnesses finance and technology to change how systems think, act and feel. He is an Ashoka Fellow, aa Lecturer at Stanford University's Department of Management Science & Engineering, a Distinguished Scholar at Stanford mediaX and a former CodeX Fellow at Stanford's Center for Legal Informatics. Bruce was trained as an international finance lawyer at Weil Gotshal & Manges in NYC (10 years) and as merchant banker at Asian Oceanic in Hong Kong (2 years). Bruce graduated The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S. Economics 1976) and Temple Law School (J.D. 1979). Bruce has been licensed to practice law in California (2006), New York (1980) and Pennsylvania (1980).

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