Like at any beauty pageant, there will be many declarations of desire to make the world a better place. On this occasion, however – the selection of the FT Sustainable Finance bank of the year – the words will be attributed to some of the largest financial institutions in the world, including last year’s winner, HSBC.

Given the finance sector’s late arrival to the corporate responsibility party, one would imagine that the pool of impeccable candidates for the title is on the shallow side. Curious, then, the shortlist for this year’s award appears to favour large global financial institutions, all of which came to sustainability relatively recently, to the exclusion of the many smaller rivals for which sustainability has always been a core value, in some cases for decades.

Take Wainwright Bank in Boston, a regional bank “equally committed to all its stakeholders – employees, customers, communities and shareholders”. Wainwright, though a small player in global terms with assets of less than $1 billion, has very successfully integrated sustainability over 20 years.

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