The Cents of Sustainability

Soneva’s CFO Bruce Bromley shares why every chief financial officer should also be the chief sustainability officer in purpose-driven companies.

- GRACE MA

Soneva’s Bruce Bromley is a man of many hats. Besides being the deputy CEO and CFO of the luxury resort group, he oversees the group’s philanthropic arm, the Soneva Foundation. The foundation supports developing projects with a positive environmental, social, and economic impact.

The former hedge fund manager used to be a regular Soneva guest until an impact investment project to distribute fuel-efficient stoves to villages in Myanmar led Bromley to cross paths with Soneva’s founder, Sonu Shivadasani.

In 2012, he joined the Soneva team. The project has now run for nine years under the Soneva Foundation, generating five excess carbon credits per stove per year. The excess credits are sold, and the revenue is ploughed back into the foundation — a circular strategy favoured by Bromley as it ensures that sustainable decisions are supported by sound bottom-line principles and vice versa.

He says: “We take it that we have a budget of zero, but we still manage to do initiatives like these because we have to create a business case out of every sustainability project.

“If corporate and sustainability strategies are parallel, at some point, they’re going to diverge, and you will have a conflict in decision-making. When you integrate them, there’s none of that conflict; whatever investments we make must be sustainable, and whatever sustainable investments we make have to be profitable.”

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