Corin Millais: from Greenpeace to Westfield to a Banksia winning bank gigwith Teachers Mutual
What’s the secret behind Teachers Mutual Bank Limited’s “banking for good” purpose, including becoming a B Corp?
Murray Hogarth talks with self-confessed sustainability nerd Corin Millais, the bank’s head of sustainability and ESG, who has steered its award-winning efforts including the Banksia National Sustainability Awards for Large Business Sustainable Leadership for over a decade, since 2011.
Q&A
You’ve gone from Greenpeace activist to corporate sustainability leader. How do you reflect on your career journey?
It’s a calling, not a career. And it’s been that way since age nine when I joined the bird watching club at school. I haven’t taken an easy path. I’ve worked at a lot of different places, which has been eclectic. From Greenpeace to Westfield and Teachers is the sweet spot between those areas, so I’ve ended up in a great place.
Do you find yourself surprised about what’s happening around you in the operating environment and how that’s all evolved?
Looking back over a couple of decades, there’s two things that stand out. Renewables. In the ‘90s, this was a campaign pipe dream. It’s gone beyond the campaign idea to being a practical, cheap solution. So the pace of pricing on renewables has been amazing. At the same time, the deterioration of the natural world has accelerated, so we live in a paradoxical age of triumphs and disasters.
So the worst of days and best of days coexisting there together?
It’s heading for a showdown, one way or the other, with solutions and the problems.
When you think about the climate crisis and net zero by 2050, and the global challenge in that, where do you end up? Are you glass half empty or glass half full?
I’m generally hopeful for the future. We’re approaching the time now where there’s only 10 years left to save the climate. The urgency and the rapidity of change will be quite strong, even though we’re heading for a two degrees world. So we’re all on this burning platform for the environment and I think everyone’s got to speed up. I’m cautiously optimistic, even though we’ve got a lot more to do.
So you are already internalising a two degrees of global heating world
What choice do we have with the way that we have treated the environment so far? We can’t undo that. We can undo what happens in the next decade, and it is the most crucial time. Everyone in climate knows that this is the time to prevent the most deleterious forecast scenarios of 3.1 (degrees Celsius) and beyond.
Looking at Teachers’ record of achievement, how does a small enterprise here at the bottom of the world generate the kind of ambition and find the focus and ability to deliver in the way it has?
It’s very natural now, sustainability is in our business, we’ve been at this for more than 15 years. I’m obsessed with the purpose of the bank, of banking for good, for those who do good. So every day you’re driven to do more. We’re a small bank, so I kind of worry about that, about the overall impact we can have, but we can only operate on our sphere of influence. What we can do is make the bank that we have the best it can be in sustainability. And that’s a never ending journey. Our EV fleet target is actually tougher than that recommended by Greenpeace, so we don’t muck about.
At Teachers you’ve taken a balanced portfolio approach to sustainability. Has that been a deliberate strategy to put it together that way?
We do trend, not trendy. So we’ve taken a holistic organisational approach, and we have a North Star to be a force in sustainability, and that’s driven the bank a long way. B Corp [certification] is quite a high standard, and I think we’re never satisfied. We’re always trying to do more and achieve more, and the bank is always open to the next level of the journey. I’ve got a campaign mindset, so I’m always going to be wanting to do more.
We see great individual performance from leadership companies like Teachers, but we also are seeing the world going backwards on just about every sustainability performance indicator that you can imagine. So how do you try to reconcile those two things?
Well, I think you’re asking, why hasn’t sustainability won yet? And that’s the question every sustainable professional asks themselves. The professional and personal for all of us in this sector is overwhelming. I mean, we’re working hard but overall, we’re not achieving what’s required for ultimate success in terms of sustainability. And that’s a personal challenge for most people, and reconciling it, well, you just have to work harder at it. You’ve just got to keep on the treadmill of trying to keep doing better than the previous year.
Do you sometimes wonder whether the system is wrong, that market-based democracy is incapable of meeting this challenge?
Of course the system is wrong. That’s why we have these global crises. But what can you do about the system? I mean, there’s a multi-trillion dollar sector in Australia, and with an $11 billion bank all we can do is fight the hardest we can for our own sphere of influence and try to have as much impact as we can.
I don’t know the answer for everyone. For me, it is just to keep working harder and harder and to try and achieve better goals and move the dial in our own area of what we can, and I hope that collectively it adds up with other people’s efforts. There’s a lot of people working hard in sustainable finance and my hope is they prevail.
Sustainability thought leaders like Lindsay Hooper and Paul Gilding in their recent Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership paper Survival of the Fittest: From ESG to Competitive Sustainability and John Elkington in his latest book Tickling Sharks are highlighting the need for sweeping systemic change. How are you processing this?
I’ve known Paul and John for 30 years, and they are spot on – talking about the pivot point we’re on. That business isn’t doing enough and there will be a transformation over the next 10 years. It’s a signal that business has an opportunity to be much more aggressive on sustainability.
What they talk about is competitive sustainability, which is what I think we’ve attempted. That’s a blueprint for the future for lots of companies to strategise on. And I think it’s inevitable. It’s a question of who will be those leaders.
You think we’re reaching an inevitable crunch point where the natural system under stress places so much pressure on the market system that it has to act?
There’s going to be a mad rush to change those things in a non-linear and competitive way. And that’s the bright spot about what will change, that it will be non-linear and dynamic and fast.
The shorthand is they’re saying that we can’t ESG our way to net zero by 2050, or out of the crisis. And part of that is that, it’s almost like business has to actually invite governments to compel it to do more. Do you buy into that?
I think we’ve run out of time for incremental approaches. Slogans and signing things are over – it’s about the hard slog of doing sustainability. Business is going to become more central to governments and vice versa. The radical change as we’ve seen in EVs or renewables is a glimpse of the future market state.
If you look at Teachers, is there an imperative to do more, to actually try to change the system in which you operate, the banking sector?
What we can be part of is the mutual sector. We’re part of more than 50 member-owned banks, and that represents a different business model for finance, where it’s member-owned, it’s democratic and sustainability in community is more innate to us. There are already eight mutual banks who are B Corps. So that trend towards community and people-focused capitalism is going to become more important. I mean, actually, more than 5 million Australians are already members of customer-owned banks, so we already are a part of the system. It’s just that it’s not widely known, because the Big Four banks are so well known and dominant.
You’ve mentioned B Corps repeatedly. Was Teachers becoming a B Corp just a matter of raising the bar for yourselves, again, or does it bring something new to the work you do?
When we committed to becoming a B Corp four years ago, it was a massive commitment, because it’s not just an ESG tick box. This is one of the world’s toughest verification frameworks on literally everything a company does. But it’s far more than that. It’s about purpose, profit-for-purpose businesses, and how businesses can do good. B Corp is brilliant. It’s one of the best things we’ve done over the last few years, because it shows the future where a company should go, in terms of doing good, having the right purpose and having the right framework for what it should be and a philosophy, and it’s bloody hard work — but so worth it.
You had to get support from your 242,000-plus members?
We had to get a vote, and we sweated on the vote even after running a big campaign. In fact, to be a B Corp, you have to change your constitution. You can’t just do a report and issue some metrics, 91 per cent of our members voted in favour of becoming a B Corp organisation, which is tremendously life affirming for us. So B Corp is very important for us, and I think a very important movement around the world about what business could be and how it could be better.
Is there a next hill to climb?
There’s no top of the hill for sustainability. You’re just always climbing so you’re always reaching for the top, but never attaining it. We do have to recertify as B Corp, and that’s tough, because the standards improve. It’s a year-long exercise to do that. And by entering the B Corp, you are entering a process for continuous improvement. If we show that next February when we get our recertification, then the bank is going well, and set up for the next three years, alongside our RIAA Responsible Investment Leader recognition.
Is the business becoming competitively advantaged by all the work you’ve done already?
We can use sustainability to compete, to support customers, to reinforce the business model and to have some competitive positioning in the marketplace. We’re a B Corp and none of the big four are.
We need to get that message out there and show how we, a bank committed to sustainability, are a compelling alternative to our bigger competitors. And there’s eight mutual banks serving more than a million customers who are B Corps already. So the alternative is already in place.
We’re looking for more traction from customers, I think, and a younger demographic to make some choices about their financial decisions. So that’s the Holy Grail, that we reach a point where there are rewards for doing the hard work and being a sustainability leader and that that drives change in the marketplace.
Just a random question to wrap up. If you could be a sustainability dictator for a day, what would you change?
Well, I’d like to abolish dictatorships.