Banking on a Just Transition: Why small is beautiful and money is mutual

An ill-fated advertising campaign by Barclays Bank in 2000 proclaimed the virtues of being big, at the same time that rural branches were being slashed, and the CEO was enjoying a massive pay rise. Eight years later, Barclays was days from collapse during the global financial crisis and implicated in various mis-selling scandals. Over the past few years, 4 of the top 5 UK banks have continued pouring over £50bn a year into fossil fuels.

If the challenge of our time is a socially just transition to a net zero society - what kind of bank is best suited to that purpose?

South West Mutual is seeking to establish the region’s first purpose-led mutual bank. Join us to discuss why money is a social relationship, not a commodity, and why smaller banks can serve the parts of the economy that big banks cannot reach.

Tony Greenham is the Executive Director of South West Mutual, a member of the Banking on a Just Transition steering group, a Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab, and was previously Director of Economics at the Royal Society of Arts, and Head of Economics and Finance at the New Economics Foundation.