In this episode of Telco Tech Talks, Anna and Varun sit down with Amparo Moraleda, a Member of the Board of Directors, Chair of the ESG Committee, and Member of the Audit Committee. As an industry leader and expert in ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) issues, Amparo provides valuable insights into the role of telecommunications companies in promoting sustainability and ethical business practices.

Throughout the conversation, Anna, Varun, and Amparo discuss a range of topics related to ESG and the telecom industry, including the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, the role of technology in promoting sustainability, and the challenges facing telecom companies as they navigate complex issues.

Amparo's wealth of experience and expertise make her an ideal guest for this informative and thought-provoking episode. Whether you're interested in the latest trends in ESG or simply curious about the role of telecom companies in promoting ethical business practices, you won't want to miss this conversation with Amparo Moraleda on Kearny Telco Tech Talks.

Presented by: Kearney
Hosts: Anna & Varun

Transcript: 

Varun:   Welcome to our first episode on Telco Tech Talks, season two, with Anna and Varun. In today’s episode, we are excited to have with us  Amparo Moraleda with Anna and Varun. She's been a senior executive in various companies, including her 20-year stint with IBM in South of Europe. She's currently a non-executive director of Vodafone Airburst, Caixa Maersk, and among and several important roles, she also heads the ESG committee of the board at Vodafone. Amparo is passionate about both ESG and technology, and that's what you'll hear from her today with the intersection of these two topics in our first Hola Amparo. 
 
Amparo: Ola Varun, it is my pleasure to be here with you, Amparo. 

Varun: We start each episode with our guests sharing a little bit about themselves. Would you like to share a few highlights on your passion for technology? 

Amparo: Of course. Well, I'm a very curious person, and learning new things is one of my passions. I think that science and technology are key pillars to understand the world we live in and, of course, to address most of the biggest challenges we face. I'm an engineer by background, and I was a girl, a STEM student, passionate about math ages before the concept, STEM was coined.  

Anna: Amparo, I love that story. You know, we spent so much time talking about girls in STEM. I know that's another passion of yours, but today we want to talk about ESG. So tell us a little bit about how you first got interested in and engaged on that topic. 

Amparo: Well, thank you. ESG is a very wide topic, and I first got acquainted with the G of ESG when I joined my first board back in 2007. It was all about learning how to run thorough processing decision-making and learning to understand how to guide CEOs, execs, and executive committees to make the right decision. Then I think that dealing with the decommissioning of the coal plant in Scotland in the absence of, cost-effective solution for carbon capture and storage was really another moment of truth because, you know, coal plants are very polluting. But on the other hand, they also used to employ a lot of people, and they were key in the energy supply of the country. So, this is a very important and impactful story, for me. 
 
Varun : That resonates a lot with me I wanted to ask you, in your own world, what do you see the companies you are involved with doing in ESG—what are they championing? 

Amparo : Yeah, I've had the privilege to observe two large B2B companies as well as two very interesting B2C ones. So, the opportunities in the ESG space range from decarbonizing integrated logistics and shipping to pioneering sustainable aviation, mostly by the means of new technology. At Caixa Bank, it's really about sustainable finance and finances with purpose. Caixa Bank has as a reference the Caixa Foundation, which is the second-largest foundation in Europe. So much depth of purpose and social drive and at Vodafone, we also embrace how to enable an inclusive and broader digital society, I mentioned that we are finding ways to impact society and really impact the access to technology of students and children, and also, for instance, what we are doing in Africa at Vodacom. We have given access to more than 50 million people to finance through the use of M-PESA, and really, our mobile, Apple, is the largest FinTech in Africa, as you very well know, and it's based on a basic telecom service, and it's given access to finance to more than 50 million people. So But, really, what I have found out is that it is purpose what brings ESG into the mainstream of organizations.  

Anna : It's exciting to hear that companies, especially large and influential ones like the ones you serve on, have a deep purpose. Speaking about Vodafone specifically, what role do you think that a technology communications company like Vodafone can play in ESG? 

Amparo : Well, I think telcos have a paramount role to play. Telcos can contribute to mitigate climate change and also to develop more inclusive and ethical digital societies, which for me is a very, very important pillar to everything telcos do to advance digital society. But we need this digital society to be inclusive for people and businesses of all sizes. So some of the examples and initiatives we are having inside of Vodafone, if I take just the climate part and the digital society part, to strengthening their resilience, and to improving the lives of people everywhere through the power of connectivity and digital services. I think that the last two years during the pandemic have really demonstrated how connectivity and digital services can be the lifeline, allowing people to work, to learn, to stay in touch with their friends and family, and even to have access to healthcare and more. we currently have more than 350 million customers connected to our next-generation mobile and fixed networks, so that's really very important. Eh, we're also committed to providing access to our V-hub technology to SMEs, who really need to embrace digital to compete, in order to gain access to services and experts to digitize but above and beyond that, we are also very mindful of how important it is to protect customer and user data and to make sure that we also make a very ethical use of artificial intelligence and algorithms in all of our relationships with our clients, whoever they are and wherever they are. 

Varun : So thanks for sharing that. Amparo and I can see the intent that telcos are showing in terms of inclusivity. Anna and I were in Barcelona, and we saw telcos launch this data access initiative, which is called Open Gateway. And we are seeing how much they want to now involve the ecosystem and other communities and share the data with the world. What would be interesting to see is: are there areas where telcos are yet to show their intent, or are there areas where they are a bit blindsided right now on the ESG agenda? 

Amparo : Well, that's a very interesting question. I think, as many organizations, telcos are going through their learning curve in order to find out how they can have the biggest impact on the ESG agenda. I think we are all trying to just find ways to leverage technology to have a positive social impact. I think we are also trying to deploy technologies to help on the climate side. By deploying IoT, we are trying to make sure that we, for instance, are improving the detection of fire and in forest. I'd like to share with you a very, very interesting story when it comes to our CO2 impact. Our Vodafone procurement companies started an exercise some time ago at trying to identify, you know, all the components that we were sourcing from Asia in the context of WTO sanctions and the ban on Huawei. So within the procurement company, we set up a lab to really strip out the technology and understand where the pieces were coming from. And these same exercises that we did over time to de-risk our supply chain is  being used to really understand what's the CO2 footprint for each one of the equipmentss and the goods we source. So we just strip them out and track each single component to understand what the CO2 footprint of that equipment is. So through procurement, we then know where those equipment and goods are shipped and which Opco are using them. So through procurement, we can really track the CO2 footprint of the company, which is amazing. And we have an app, and by just selecting a country or a specific set of products and goods, we can see the CO2 footprint of our organization. The other very interesting thing associated with this is that we are developing an Ecolab and we are trying to bring other telcos into this initiative. So we have a standard to just assign a lab to, at, an Ecolab, to the items that we procure. And they are; most of them are very common to many telcos. And the last thing we have introduced is that we have assigned a 20% weight in to our request for procurement for the ESG component from our suppliers. So we attribute a 20% weight in our request for goods in our request for procurement to our suppliers. So we are starting to weight into our decision-making process how socially and climate-responsible our suppliers are. Likewise, in our business cases, now we also consider the CO2 footprint when it comes to future costs in our business cases. There are many ways to walk the talk, and I think we just need to make sure that the boards set the tone and executives really deploy into the mainstream of the organization this way of understanding social responsibility and environmental impact. 

Anna : Amparo, thank you for that example. I think it is interesting to see how you bring it to life, especially in the telco context, because we know that telcos are some of the most massive energy users in the world, and many are sort of focused on their direct emissions right now, but it's interesting to hear that you're really focusing on the indirect and scope 3 emissions through the procurement process. You touched on it a little bit, but I'd like to put a fine point on it. how can boards of telcos help drive this kind of thinking in the organization? 

Amparo: Well, we're all about making sure that all these initiatives and all these programs really go mainstream. What we do is really ask executives to come and present what they're doing in the op course, when a main op course, I mean in the countries, for instance, if we want to review the progress on environmental, we would just ask the general manager, the CEO of, Vodafone in Germany, to really explain how he's progressing in the supply of renewable energy, how he's just dealing with renewables in site generation, how they are really replacing refrigerants, gases, and fire suppressants with the highest global warming potential in their operating company, how they're switching to electric vehicles. You can set the tone from the top, but then the execution and the progress really depend on how the executives bring those principles into their mainstream. That's definitely the only critical success factor for you to become true. 

Varun : That's right. And let me shift gears a little bit here. We know that telcos cannot achieve their goals on their own, so I wanted to talk about innovation. In the ecosystem itself, do you see any impactful cleantech startups and ventures that are showing up?  

Amparo: I see some use cases of IoT when it comes to climate change, be it fire detection, be it really controlling the emissions. I'm also seeing an impact on the implementation of the circular economy. For instance, with the reuse of digital devices, we are just trying to make sure that we either recycle, reuse, or redeploy digital devices when they come to the end of their lives. There are a proliferation of start-ups, some catered to specific ESG use cases, with some product offerings, but again, no really winner in that space yet. The other big ecosystem that is developing is really all the ecosystem around energy, around hydrogen, so we are seeing companies such as Green Cell Energy. In hydrogen, we are seeing companies emerge and try to develop in the case of shipping e-methanol and bio-methanol. But again, I think that there is still no major project at scale, and I think this is the biggest challenge we face. How we are going to get traction on the energy transition around hydrogen energy supply and shipping is just imperative. Aerospace is also imperative. The availability of sustainable aviation fuels just 10% of all flights, so far used by airlines at twice the price, sometimes even three times the price of kerosene. I was referring before to my experience back in 2009 in Scotland and the commissioning of a huge power plant called Power Plant because the carbon capture and storage solutions were not yet available. I mean, we are in 2023, and carbon capture and storage solutions are not yet available at scale.  

Anna : In that story, what was also really interesting to me was sort of the push and pull between E and S, right Amparo, because the coal-fired power plant offers a lot of jobs to the community, which can be, you know, uplifting to the community in its own way but has a negative environmental impact. Like, we're actually going through a similar issue in our local community because there's a mandate to shut down the coal plants, and they're taking a lot of prime farmland and converting it to solar. On your point, we're just at the beginning, and how do we convince people, and what do you say to people about why this is important and why they should care about it? 

Amparo : It's really about focusing on the long term. And this is one of the topics where you need to go through a short-term payoff to really achieve a long-term gain. So, and honestly, the debate around energy might be more difficult because we are currently operating in a high-inflation environment with lots of cost pressure, and the energy is just adding to that equation and creating a kind of cost build-up, so it's definitely a very, very difficult topic, I think that on the social side, the dialogue and the conversation are much, much easier, and when it comes to human rights, when it comes to really including people, and when it comes to really protecting consumers and companies via data protection, via ethical use of artificial intelligence and algorithms, I think this is something that we would agree with, and it's very easy to drive in the organizations. 
 
Anna : Amparo, well, it's certainly inspiring to me, so I hope it'll be inspiring to the listeners of the podcast as well. We like to finish off each episode with the same five questions to learn more about you as a person and to help the listeners learn a little bit more about you as a person.  

Anna : So, first of all, what motivates you? 

Amparo: Learning motivates me, keeps me curious, and keeps me alive. 

Anna :   That's great.  Me too.  What do you like to do when you're not at work? 

Amparo: I like to work out and exercise, and I also like a lot being with my family. These are my two passions, I would say. 

Anna : Me too, again. Why is the entire telecom industry more relevant than ever? 

Amparo: Telcos are really at the center of everything we do by providing connectivity and access to information, so I think that they are more important than ever. 

Anna :  If you could change one thing in the industry, what would it be? 

Amparo : I would definitely try to protect the Telcos investment capabilities. The market structure in many European markets is not right. Regulators have been focusing solely on the consumer, driving incredible value destruction in many, many countries. The other aspect I would try to change is that really big tech companies pay for the services they get out of the six companies that drive 60% of internet traffic, and they are monetizing really the investment made by the telcos without contributing their fair share in terms of revenues to the big value they extract from it.  

Anna: Yeah. I'm on par with that; that echoes a lot of what we heard recently at Mobile World Congress, and we know it's been harder for the European Telcos to really invest in 5G technology, because they're held back in this way. Okay, last question, what is your most recommended book or podcast? 

Amparo : Well, I'll go for a classic here. I would recommend The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. It's an amazing history book, but most of all, for me, it's a great business book because it will tell you how to run a big multinational through the eyes of a Roman emperor. There are many tips and many insights in that book, which I thoroughly recommend to anyone who's interested in history or in business. 

Anna : Okay, great. That's an interesting choice. I'll have to read it, actually, Roman. Tom's a particular passion and interest of mine as well.  

Amparo: Thank you. 

Varun : Gracias, Amparo, for providing insightful and honest views. I like your clarity on what you believe will change quickly and what will take more time and some more pain,  

I hope our listeners enjoy every minute of this episode as much as Anna and I did, and goodbye. Adios. 

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