Look beyond US ESG retreat for long-term winners, says climate banker

When Marisa Drew, chief sustainability officer of Standard Chartered, first decided to leave a successful investment banking career to focus on sustainability, her friends and colleagues were skeptical.

“There were all the little cynical quips,” Drew told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in the latest episode of the “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players” podcast. “But what was interesting about it was most people, since they had seen me go through the very traditional side of the business and they knew who I was as a person and how I was driven to try to really deliver value for the organization, even if they were cynical, they were curious.”

Attracted by the opportunity to disrupt existing industries and move banks into the future, Drew dove into the chief sustainability officer role, first at Credit Suisse and then moving to Standard Chartered in mid-2022. The timing has been good, she says, with a younger generation of clients looking for new ways to invest.

“It was captivating all sorts of stakeholders,” Drew said. “You had the next generation in our wealth business that were saying, and they were very emotional about it, ‘When I receive the family wealth, I want to invest it for positive outcomes.’”

In spite of growing pushback against ESG investing in the U.S. — and a strategic shift in climate policy from one of the world’s richest backers of the sector, Bill Gates, which he explained in a CNBC interview on Tuesday — Drew believes that the industries of the future will have sustainability at their heart and the market represents a massive and growing opportunity.

“These systemic problems aren’t going to go away, they’re getting bigger,” she said. “Climate change is proliferating whether you believe it’s man made or not. The effects are real, and they are creating enormous disruption to livelihoods, to financial and economic viability, in some cases to market health, to how we think about risk, and so we’re going to have to tackle this.”

Drew was named to the second annual CNBC Changemakers list in 2025.

Drew suggests looking beyond North America for opportunity. Some of the biggest and fastest-growing economies in the world, including China, India, Indonesia and the Middle East – are drawing trillions of dollars of sustainable investment, she said. Beyond electric vehicles, they are building sustainable infrastructure, ports and transport systems. 

“That’s the sort of disruption that I’m talking about, and that’s what gives me the absolute energy and conviction to keep going,” Drew said. “My belief is that if you can stay the course — find out how to make it work for you and your organization — when the history books are written, those that remain committed to a sustainable outcome are going to be the businesses and the models that are going to survive long-term.” 

The key to getting clients on board has been convincing them that these investments can deliver not only on their sustainability goals, but on financial returns. But to reap the benefits, Drew says investors often must be willing to make multi-year investment commitments. “It is that commitment that gets a long-term payback,” she said.

Her advice for impact-driven young entrepreneurs aiming to disrupt industries with sustainable businesses:

“Your passion for the sustainability aspect or the impact aspect, that is absolutely critical,” Drew said. “But you also have to remember, if you’re raising money, that you need to also be able to make a case for financial returns if you are not a social enterprise, and sometimes that gets lost in the impact story … Make sure that you are crisp in being able to articulate that, otherwise the money won’t come and that’s the lifeblood of the capital that’s going to keep your business going.”

Follow and listen to this and every episode of the “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players” podcast on Apple and Spotify.