Top banks get serious about going green

Banks are working hard to boost their green credentials by using technology to reduce their environmental impact.

Speaking at BT's Green Bank event in London this week, international CIO of Morgan Stanley, Jonathan Saxe, said: "I'm investing with a lot of the green issues."

He explained the bank is using various approaches to improve its environmental standing, including raising awareness, producing a tactical work plan and integrating green goals into people's responsibilities.

One of the chief aims for Morgan Stanley is to reduce its CO2 emissions by 10 per cent over the next five years.

Measures already in place on the IT side of the business include encouraging staff to turn off their PCs at night and greater use of videoconferencing to cut down on travel.

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The organisation has also switched to using printers that print on both sides of paper to halve the amount of paper used. Previously the bank printed 300,000 pages per day in Europe.

There is also the use of what Saxe called "collaborative technologies", such as personal carbon calculators for employees on the internal website.

Saxe said a lot of work is going into the bank's supplier and vendor ecosystem to implement green issues into contracts - ensuring vendors comply with emerging environmental standards.

Saxe referred to Firebird, a programme to examine how Morgan Stanley's 12 data centres around the world can be made more efficient and cost effective - with air cooling seen as one of the future options.

He said the bank is asking whether computer resources are being used as efficiently as possible, with virtualisation seen as a better way of allocating resources.

Head of group sustainable development at HSBC, Jon Williams, explained what his company is doing to improve its environmental standing. "We need to be smarter," he said.

According to Williams, HSBC became the world's first carbon-neutral bank in October 2005 and has opened its own 150-megawatts wind farm in Wales.

Other HSBC initiatives include a zero-carbon branch in New York, and wind and solar energy trials at its UK training centre at Bricket Wood.

The high-street bank also partakes in the international carbon exchange programme, buying 813,000 carbon credits in 2006 to cancel out its own carbon emissions.