Sustainability Performance
Financing the Transition

Bank ABC’s unique global footprint, leadership in digital innovation and deep expertise, positions us to work closely with our clients and support their transitions. This is a key element of our sustainability strategy and is focused on leveraging our global network to deepen client engagement and accelerate our sustainable and transition finance offering. 

In the past two years, almost 90% of our sustainable finance was channelled to emerging markets, capitalising on our geographical footprint across GCC, North Africa, Turkey, Brazil and South-East Asia. We are enhancing our capabilities to scale the support of our clients’ future financing needs through the launch of various initiatives. These include enhancing client engagement through comprehensive training programmes for our client-facing teams, developing innovative solutions to address the diverse needs of our clients and collaborating with them to unlock novel solutions.

We introduced our Sustainable Finance Framework (Framework), which provides a robust approach to measuring and reporting sustainable finance. It outlines the methodology for classifying our sustainable financial products and services, across green, social, sustainable and sustainability-linked finance. The framework was developed in collaboration with the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Corporate, a leading global provider of ESG analysis and ratings.

Our sustainable finance assets are generated from activities classified under green, social, sustainable and sustainability-linked financing as defined by our Sustainable Finance Framework. Transition finance is not included in our classification of sustainable finance as transition finance relates to finance provided to high carbon emitting industries and thus falls outside the scope of sustainable finance. Nevertheless, we expect transition finance to become an increasingly important business segment as we recognise the substantial impact that can be achieved by aiding high carbon emitting clients in their transition strategies. As such, we have defined transition finance in the appendix of our Sustainable Finance Framework and report separately on that. 

Having said that, we also recognise that sustainable and transition finance are closely inter-related. Increasing the scale and capacity of renewable energy and other clean technologies via sustainable finance is a key enabler that allows high carbon emitting industries to accelerate their decarbonisation strategies by ensuring access to clean energy sources. At the same time, these high carbon emitting industries require significant levels of transition finance to invest in the new technologies and processes that allow their shift toward a low carbon economy.