Driving sustainable initiatives and meeting our EV100 commitments

We’re constantly on the lookout for ways to generate awareness around climate change and reduce our environmental impact. When signing up to EV100 back in 2019, we committed to install EV chargers in 15% of parking spaces in our main office locations across the UK by 2025, which we’re proud to say we have done.

EV100 is a global initiative bringing together organisations committed to switching their owned and leased vehicles from internal combustion engine to electric vehicles (EVs) and installing EV charging infrastructure for colleagues and customers by 2030.

Research indicates ease and affordability of charging are seen as key considerations when it comes to switching to EVs, and that access to chargers is not always easy, in particular for colleagues living in flats and city centre areas where chargers can be more difficult to install at home. We joined EV100 to help our colleagues with these issues by installing EV infrastructure across our main office locations in the UK. Meeting our commitment through the roll-out of EV chargers across our office portfolio supports our colleagues to travel more sustainably to those locations.

With EV chargers now available in most of our main UK office locations, our focus is on providing EV chargers in more office and branch locations across the UK by 2030.

Over and above our EV100 commitment, we’ve also demonstrated our commitment to sustainable travel with two electric mobile banks now on the road, serving customers in remote areas of the UK. The vans have a bespoke design to reduce weight to run more efficiently, using low carbon materials and components. The solar panels help power equipment inside, reducing the need for charging daily. Phase two of this project is currently underway with plans for additional EV mobile banks to be added to the fleet.

Improving the sustainability of our technology

Meanwhile, our Technology team in NatWest Digital X and partners have also been working hard to track and reduce our carbon footprint, picking up two recent industry awards in the process.

Back in 2019, Technology did not have a mechanism to track and measure the carbon impact of our technology, covering areas such as application hosting infrastructure, network devices, and end-user devices like colleague phones and laptops. The Technology Climate Dashboard was built to enable this, and a climate community of practice was established to embed the Technology climate strategy, share goals, and track progress.

The dashboard provides colleagues with valuable insights, where teams can explore data by domain, application, and even server level to identify the primary contributors to their carbon footprint and monitor their progress toward our sustainability goals. Additionally, the tool offers help to interpret the data and highlight areas for potential improvement.

Thanks in part to the dashboard and the focus on moving to more sustainable systems, we’re excited to have achieved our internal ambition of reducing our technology footprint by 20% a year ahead of the schedule.