VIDEO | Finastra’s Sandrine Markham on technology’s role in sustainable finance - Trade Treasury Payments

Video not playing? Watch via Youtube.

At the ICC UK Sustainability Conference in London, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) spoke with Sandrine Markham, Global Lead for Sustainable Finance Solutions at Finastra, to explore the role of technology in enabling sustainability objectives across the financial sector.

Markham said, “Technology is quintessential. It’s part of the foundation when it comes to sustainability, but even more so in sustainable finance.” She pointed to the need for collaboration across the private and public sectors, academia, and industry, and the infrastructure required to connect them. “Technology is the glue,” she said.

One example comes from viticulture. Markham described how, due to climate change, champagne producers are now cultivating vineyards in southern England, an area traditionally outside the growing zone for sparkling wine. Satellite imagery, IoT soil sensors, and weather-linked analytics now help producers monitor vineyard health and optimise operations. That same data infrastructure, she explained, can be connected to finance.

“If a champagne house wants to borrow and they want to have a sustainable impact, they can do what we call a sustainability-linked loan,” said Markham. In these structures, specific key performance indicators (KPIs) are embedded in the loan documentation and tracked throughout the lending lifecycle. “That’s what we have right now at Finastra,” she said. “All the KPIs are calculated and linked directly to the performance of the loan.”

But environmental KPIs are only part of the equation. Increasingly, financial institutions are also looking to integrate social outcomes, especially around gender.

Markham pointed to a project in India, where women working on salt farms transitioned from diesel-powered pumps to solar pumps, backed by public-private collaboration. “You’re minimising GHG emissions, so there’s your voluntary carbon credit,” she said. “But more importantly, the project was about SDG 5.5: gender equality. These women increased their income and received training. The technology linked it all, and investors could see the impact. It was qualified, quantified, and verified.”

Whether tracking emissions or measuring progress against social targets, technology is becoming a necessary enabler of trust, transparency, and accountability in sustainable finance. “It’s all about making the impact palpable,” said Markham.