Triodos: The app proving that ‘ethical banking’ doesn’t have to be an oxymoron

My twentysomething son had tried to sign up with an “ethical bank” a couple of years ago and had lighted on Triodos. But he passed on them because of their lack of a convenient debit card. “You can tell your son the good news,” says Bevis Watts, pulling a debit card out of his wallet. “Not only do we have one now, but it’s biodegradable too.” They also have solar panels on the roof of their HQ in Bristol. Among their higher-profile customers, Triodos can boast model Lily Cole, who can now be seen on YouTube saying, “Change your bank, change the world”.

I’ve met a few bankers over the ages, and Bevis Watts is unlike any of them. For one thing he is wearing an open-necked shirt. For another, he is an environmentalist at heart who stumbled into banking. One more thing: we meet in a small vegan cafe near Liverpool Street where Watts points out that since the Paris Agreement other banks have pumped £1.6 trillion into fossil fuels globally – and £150bn in the UK alone. Triodos has loaned precisely nothing to anyone electing to set fire to the planet. This is Extinction Rebellion thinking applied to high finance.

Bevis Watts studied business at Swansea University but he also took a diploma in Swedish that took him to Sweden for a year (his Svenska is reasonably fluent). While he was away his father – a teacher – died suddenly. Watts the younger received hundreds of cards from his former pupils and colleagues with a recurrent theme: the difference Watts senior had made to people’s lives. All of which prompted young Bevis to ask himself: “What difference am I going to make to people’s lives?”

He was being groomed for one of the big four banks. At the same time he was very influenced by green thinking in Sweden. “They all have wooden huts,” says Watts. “No wonder they gave us Greta Thunberg.” Trying to reconcile ethics and finance, he went on to do a PhD on The Economics of Recycling. After ten years spent in the recycling industry, Watts realised that banks were “oblivious to their societal impact: that kind of environmental consciousness just didn’t exist.” They responded to only two key imperatives: maximum return and minimum risk. It was, in a word (no surprise here), all about the money. The notion of corporate responsibility was only “a sticking plaster over a gaping wound”.

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Then, in 2003, Bevis Watts met Triodos. “That was an eye-opener,” he says. It was a different kind of bank, founded in the Netherlands in 1980, focused on how it could support change in the context of pollution and the climate crisis. It was the greening of banking. After a year of voluntary work overseas, Watts joined the bank in the midst of the 2008 financial crash. Triodos was relatively sheltered from subprime contagion because it didn’t borrow from other banks. They now have 700,000 customers in Europe and 60,000 in the UK.

Another thing Watts showed me while I was sitting there drinking my dairy-free coffee was the Triodos app. Unlike just about any other bank you can name, they publish their list of loans. If you want to borrow from Triodos you have to be willing to have your name right out there. When I click on Cambridge, for example, the “Countryside Restoration Trust” pops up. “There’s no reason other banks can’t do this,” says Watts, “unless they have something to hide.” I click on east London and “Café Direct” comes up – a fair trade coffee brand. I get the impression that green shoots are sprouting up all over England.

Watts says, “If people knew what their bank was actually doing with their money, then the world would be a different place very quickly.” He has the idea that, rather as with smoking around children or drink driving in the past, it will soon become socially unacceptable to not know what your money is doing. Triodos was one of the founding signatories to the UN Principles for Responsible Banking, requiring greater transparency and sustainable development goals. One hundred and thirty banks have signed up, but not three of our big four banks. Do you want your bank to be “irresponsible” with your money? I don’t.

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Watts reckons that we’ve become addicted to growth for growth’s sake. He says that a bank’s first purpose must be to “keep your money safe”, but included in that is using it in the long term interests of the customer, in a way that is not going to kill the planet, and actively supporting a low carbon economy.

He dreams of one day having a smallholding somewhere in England and “rewilding”. In the meantime, he aims to change the conventional interpretation of the word “banker”. In the last decade or two “banker” has attracted so much opprobrium (probably for good reason) that some bankers don’t like to reveal their real job at parties for fear of getting booted out. Watts wants to recalibrate and demonstrate that the banker can be one of the good guys, that this job can be as “vocational” as joining Greenpeace and saving whales. “We have a mission,” he says. They don’t pay performance-related bonuses. “We try to hire people who have a burning passion.” He predicts that in the future only companies that have a social purpose and a clear conscience will be successful.

There is a school of thought that maintains that our fate is driven by money and obscure (and usually dark) “forces”, beyond our control. Bevis Watts doesn’t think like this. After his aunt died, he found himself clearing out her house and came across a presentation pack of new decimal coins, amounting to 18 and a half pence, dating from 1971. They are now worth the princely sum of £27.99 on eBay. But their significance is greater than this. “I realised something,” Watts says. “We made these coins. They’re a man-made creation. We created the banking system. We can change it if we want to. We have the power to choose.”