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Dutch bank ING said this week that it will drop large clients it believes are not making sufficient progress on reducing their climate impact.
The announcement comes just days before leaders convene for Climate Week NYC 2024 September 22-29 to showcase leading climate action and discuss how to do more.
The annual event is hosted by the Climate Group and New York City and takes place in conjunction with the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and The World Economic Forum's annual Sustainable Development Impact Meetings, which bring together more than 1,000 business leaders, policymakers, international and civil society organizations, innovators and social entrepreneurs to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The 2030 deadline for the UN SDGs is fast approaching, but less than a fifth of the SDG targets are on track. While there has been minimal or moderate progress on nearly half of the targets, more than a third have stalled or even regressed, the UN's Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024 found in June.
"Now, more than ever, businesses need to recognize that “the imperative for action on environmental issues is one not of morality or consumer sentiment but the laws of nature,” says an essay by Linsay Hopper, interim CEO of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CSIL) and CISL fellow Paul Gilding, which was published this week in The Financial Times. “Climate change and biodiversity loss are not abstract threats but real and measurable factors that will undermine business as usual,” says the essay. “Rather than asking ‘How much sustainability can we afford?’ companies must ask ‘How do we accelerate, navigate and benefit from the transition’?”
Read on to learn more about this story and this week's other important technology news impacting business.

Former Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers talks about why he believes AI voice will become the primary interface for all devices, including personal assistants, computers, mobile phones, cars and wearables, as well as the security engine of the future. If you are not yet a paying subscriber sign-up for a free four-week trial to find out what you have been missing and access this exclusive column.

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India’s Multiplier AI is a global AI-first healthcare marketing platform that aims to help pharmaceutical and medical device companies scale their marketing efforts more effectively by addressing key problems such as low physician response rates, extended sales cycles, and the lack of traceability in marketing campaigns. Customers include Merck, Abbot, MedtronicMedronic, and Japan’s Nitto Denko Corporation.
The company is an example of how generative AI is transforming marketing.
“We provide a marketing platform that has modules to add, clean, label and augment datasets and engage and deliver physician marketing in an AI-first world, enabling our clients to move from traditional digital marketing methods to advanced, data-powered, AI-driven strategies,” says CEO Vikram Kumar, who co-founded the company in 2016 with Saumya Prakash.
Multiplier AI, which is housed in Hyderabad’s T-Hub accelerator, has a presence in India, the U.S. and nine countries in SE Asia. It says it has partnerships with over 30 leading pharmaceutical companies. It is targeting Europe through partners, which include medical communications agencies and IT service companies in the life science sector. The company says it has built pan-European and pan-Africa databases of physicians and has added several European languages.

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