Why is it so critical for us to be looking ahead and what role does HSBC and the financial sector overall play in the future of the energy transition?
Tim Lord: In terms of what HSBC and the finance sector can do, I guess three things I’ d highlight very briefly. One is supporting investment, so enabling access to capital, enabling the capital to flow to where it needs to, thinking about the way that we do that because some of these projects are much more capital intensive than their fossil fuel alternatives.
Secondly, how we help clients navigate that transition, it’ s very complex. It’ s not just about energy companies, it’ s about the whole economy, it’ s about every household.
And I think the third thing is about connectivity. There are some organisations that have the privilege of working right across the economy and how do we connect the innovators to the large corporate clients? How do we connect the people needing finance to the people who might buy those products? And hopefully we can provide that finance.
Andrew Toher: I think we’ re at an interesting point in the market. We’ re seeing a real divergence. The regulatory environment is a significant driver and we’ re seeing some other divergence between what’ s happening in the US versus Europe. We’ ve got this rollback from some of the legislation that supported renewables in
Europe. To an extent that’ s happening less, so still pushing forwards. But what we see in the market is the companies that are very strategic, that are really looking long-term at staying on the path and pushing forward with their plans, maybe are just talking about it a bit less.
Saleh ElHattab: Often when we talk about decarbonisation or the transition, we forget about the low-hanging fruit, energy efficiency wins. And when I think about the US alone, there’ s US $ 2tn of inefficient energy consumption every year that’ s literally just money wasted. And so in addition to the macro transition, which hopefully we’ ll all be on the right track for over the next couple of decades, there are incremental wins that each corporation can achieve.
Abbie Badcock-Broe: We need to have much more resilient ways of being able to future proof ourselves. Our economy is built on electricity and we need to make sure that we can still grow and develop in the future. That means that it’ s about how we build new infrastructure, but how do we make that infrastructure work smarter for us, more efficiently, better related data, better flexibility as well, so that we can pass on savings to consumers.
110 November 2025