Now nine years into his role at the Singapore Management University (SMU), Associate Professor Liang Hao looks back at various profiles of students he has taught for nearly a decade — from undergraduates to graduate students, PhD candidates and even executives.
His courses on sustainable finance began slightly before the retail market took notice of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) theme.
“We were probably one of the earliest in Asia to offer an undergraduate course on sustainable finance, back in 2018. At least in Singapore, for sure, we were the first,” says Liang.
As market demand for sustainable finance grew, so did SMU’s offerings. This August, SMU will welcome its first batch of full-time and part-time Master of Sustainability graduate students. All SMU undergraduates matriculating this year will also have to complete at least one sustainability course as a graduation requirement.
“So clearly, you see demand coming up, and I was among the first to actually start teaching this topic,” says Liang, a recipient of the Ho Bee Professorship in Sustainability Management, awarded in July 2023.
In 2020, London’s Imperial College Business School and SMU’s Lee Kong Chian School of Business launched the Singapore Green Finance Centre (SGFC) — Singapore’s first research institute dedicated to green finance research and talent development — with support from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and nine financial institutions.
Liang, who has been a part of the SGFC since its inception, is today one of its three co-directors supporting centre director Nikki Kemp.
New courses
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In April, SGFC announced four courses in support of the Sustainable Finance Jobs Transformation Map unveiled by MAS and the Institute of Banking and Finance (IBF).
Liang is instructor of the Sustainable Investment Management Course, a six-module e-learning course tailored for finance professionals.
“I talk about ESG criteria, sustainable business practices, and I also talk about some economics, which is more academically oriented,” says Liang. “I’m an academic, so I believe in scientific findings rather than just talking; so I provide some academic evidence about whether you can make more money or less money, whether you achieve superior or inferior returns from sustainable investing compared to traditional investing.”
Liang also talks about the instruments available, such as green, social, sustainable and sustainability-linked bonds, along with the emerging realm of transition instruments. His recorded lectures also cover ESG ratings, shareholder activism and the “many” international sustainability reporting frameworks in use today.
He adds: “We have so many different ESG ratings [and] reporting standards that focus on different issues; there is no common standard. That’s why sustainable investing is not a black-and-white thing… Beauty [is] in the eyes of the beholder.”
The Sustainable Investment Management Course is available on the Investment Management Association of Singapore’s iLearn platform. It is one of two courses developed by SGFC and listed on iLearn — the other being the Sustainability Stewardship Development Course, which is taught by Rajiv Lall, SGFC management committee member and Professorial Research Fellow at the Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics at SMU.
There is even one course offered to the public, free of charge. Introduction to Sustainability & Sustainable Finance is SMU’s first massive open online course and supported by SMU’s Executive Development.
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Taught by Lall, the three modules feature interviews with over 20 subject matter experts, including key members of SGFC’s nine founding partners, such as Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Schroders, Standard Chartered Bank and UBS; along with representatives from the Singapore Exchange S68 , Blackrock and DBS.
Competence-washing
Liang hopes courses like his can deter “competence-washing” — a phenomenon where some professionals claim to be “ESG experts” but do not know how to implement sustainable practices in a business.
“Part of the reason is we don’t have sufficiently standardised certificates or a competency framework,” says Liang. “What IBF and MAS are trying to do actually impressed a lot of people from the US and Europe. The government actually tells you: ‘Okay, if you want to claim you’re an expert, you need to take these courses.’”
Corporate sustainability has only been mainstream for a few years, so professionals in the space are sometimes seen as a monolith — a jack of all trades.
But “just by nature”, it is difficult to be an expert on multiple areas, says Liang. “I can’t claim that I’m a climate scientist, and I talk to climate scientists from time to time to understand their knowledge about biodiversity, the loss of species, the ecosystem and how it works. They also talk to me from time to time, asking about the financial economics behind policy discussions; and so, everybody’s learning from one another.”
Hard green truth
Liang says he meets many sceptics in his line of work. “They ask me: ‘Do you really believe in that? Because many people talk about green finance but they are not sincere. They talk about green because they want to make money.’”
Instead of being put off by their comments, Liang agrees. “Yes, people care about money when they talk about green finance; that’s exactly the point.”
For jobseekers, MAS has talked up the opportunities in the sustainable finance sector, which Liang reiterates.
A report by MAS and IBF released in April claims that between 4,000 and 5,000 jobs related to sustainable finance are expected to be created in Singapore over the coming decade.
Looking at the region, Southeast Asia is projected to require between $4 trillion and $5 trillion in sustainable financing over the next 10 years.
Accompanying the report and news of the e-learning courses, MAS announced in April a $35 million injection into the Financial Sector Development Fund to support upskilling, reskilling and the development of specialists in sustainable finance over the next three years.
It would be “very hard” to convince the industry if sustainable finance is marketed as a sure loss, says Liang. “If you tell people, let’s be sustainable, and by the way, it will cost you this much every year, it’ll be very hard to mobilise the private-sector funding.”
Green finance is about “aligning” the incentive of the private sector with the environmental or sustainable goals to be achieved, he adds. “What’s the incentive of the private sector? They want to make money. There’s no problem with that; you can’t tell them to be good people, to be sincere when they talk about sustainability, but at the cost of their returns.”
Photos: Albert Chua/The Edge Singapore
