What do you get when you cross a determined elementary school kid in Greece with inspiration to grow her mind - provided by a curmudgeonly Harvard law professor strongly challenging his students on TV?
Eventually, a leader in the sustainability community, as chief marketing officer of Temenos. In 2021, the Switzerland-based firm received “Bronze Class distinction” from
S&P’s Global Sustainability Awards” for its excellent sustainability performance, as well as being awarded “Industry Mover” status for recording the “strongest year on year score improvement” in its industry.
But first, for Kalliopi Chioti, came getting good grades to qualify for college, and specifically this response from her mother: “Okay, in order to go to Harvard, you need to work hard, you need to do your homework, you need to learn foreign languages. The
sky's the limit.” So that’s what Chioti promised her mum she would do.
Chioti did achieve her goal. She visited the site of the television drama
The Paper Chase, starring John Houseman. In fact, she did so after journeying to Boston following undergraduate work in Athens, and earned a master’s degree in education – administration, planning and social policy from Harvard after getting a previous
Masters in corporate public relations from Boston University, just across the Charles River.
How Chioti became a rising star in the sustainability field
Chioti loved living in America, but returned to Greece following several jobs after her Boston experience, including time as a research consultant at The World Bank in Washington, DC. Now, after almost eight years at Temenos, she actually wears three hats
– chief marketing, ESG, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) officer for the software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider to 700 banks across the globe. However, she didn’t know at first if she wanted the CSR job Temenos was offering if it meant she would have
to report to its marketing team.
Already very knowledgeable about the issues surrounding sustainability and ESG, Chioti didn’t want her new role to be about “a set of tactics in order to look nice and green.” She felt strongly that she wanted to do more “to build the strategy, the agenda
to take it to the next level” for Temenos.
‘Greenwashing’ was something to be avoided, and though she worked with the marketing staff as she developed the Athens-based company’s ESG program, she insisted on environmental and social responsibility being ‘embedded’ in its daily operations. The added
marketing chief role came a few years later.
“Temenos was ahead of its time to recognise how that trend (toward authentic sustainability and reporting) was moving,” says Chioti. Pressure on businesses to decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has since continued to grow, as has her expertise in the
field. She participated in a
panel discussion at SIBOS 2023, along with other leading experts in ESG, explaining how sustainability, and also social awareness and equity, must become a part of the organisation’s “DNA,” not just a separate department or initiative disconnected from
“normal” corporate activities.
Businesses are adapting to new ESG reporting standards
“Financial institutions are rethinking their business models, and they need to place ESG within the core of their operations. They have all these savvy environmental and socially aware customers coming to them.”
Sharing an example of what this can mean, from experience with one of Temenos’s customers Chioti explains: “It’s a digital bank in Italy, part of a big, traditional, bank that approached all these young people who would like to do things through their phones.
The bank came to us and said they wanted to be operating in the cloud, and they wanted to know the carbon impacts from their transactions. So, this is what we helped them do.”
Chioti states that for the company’s client to comply with all the different requirements of becoming carbon-neutral, they needed to know the impact of every activity, including emissions from their banking systems. Now, says Chioti, “we provide them with
a report (using) the Temenos carbon calculator, detailing emissions as well as energy savings from lower consumption achieved through using the company’s cloud-based software,” instead of an on-premise installation more common to legacy bank systems.
Having such tools available for customers, and providing them with “leaner and greener” cloud-based software, says Chioti, is a strategic imperative, and an advantage vs. some of Temenos’s competitors. “What we have seen is that three quarters of banks will
be offering ESG and sustainable solutions within the next five years. 74% will offer funding to environmental projects, while 64% will stay away from carbon intensive industries. This is the trend moving forward. What we also see is that in some banks, it's
not an issue that is handled by the sustainability people. It has become a CEO and board level issue.”