Michael Vander seeks European green industry standard
Published by Asset Finance Europe
February 2010
By Julia Kollewe
Michael Vander, an associate at the Alta Group, wants to make it easier for leasing and asset finance companies to adopt green practices by developing an industry standard.
Vander, a senior practitioner in banking and asset finance whose career spans management roles at CIT group, Deutsche Leasing and De Lage Landen, recently set up the LinkedIn group Green Leasing&Finance together with the Alta Group’s EMEA chairman, Malcolm Ogle.
He explains: “We’ve set up the group not only to discuss financing of renewable energy, but also challenges faced by companies in offsetting their own CO2 emissions. The goal is to turn the group into an international competence centre on green issues.”
“I have worked with big clients for years and it is clear that everyone wants to improve their green credentials. The question is how do you come up with an industry approach that reduces the environmental impact of IT and internal processes.”
The LinkedIn group currently has 23 members and Vander hopes to get that number up to 50-75. Any higher, he says, and the group risks becoming a talking shop rather than a force for change.
The aim is to come up with a standardised approach to offsetting carbon emissions on normal assets that covers several industries. It should be available to vendor partnerships as well as project leases.
Apart from key people at asset finance firms, Vander is looking for European specialists to join the group, such as those dealing with used equipment, organisations that deal in CO2 certificates and those running websites.
The idea grew out of his work advising leasing companies and vendors internationally. He notes that while all big international companies include green issues in their core strategic goals, their commitments are often “woolly” and they struggle to implement them.
Smaller firms are more reluctant to make such commitments for cost reasons. In Germany, three quarters of small and medium-sized firms – the Mittelstand – are “very passive,” although they don’t rule out adopting environmental objectives once they become common practice.
Nonetheless, most support for green leasing initiatives comes from Germany where many manufacturers of environmental technologies are based, he says, while the UK is clearly a “developing country” that still has a lot to do on this front.
