Sustainable Finance

• Our
  policies
• Lending
  principle
• Sustainable
  lending
• Product &
  service evolution
• Engagement
• Our
  performance
• News

Our performance

We made good progress on developing our approach to sustainable lending in 2006 and have a clear plan for further work in this area in 2007.

We began a major exercise to review our approach to environmental and social risk in lending, completing reviews of four of the most sensitive areas - forestry, palm oil, ship-breaking and child labour. Policies will be developed based on these reviews. We plan to do further sector reviews in 2007.

We also published, as planned, our first report on Sustainable Lending and the Equator Principles. During the year we adopted the revised Equator Principles, EP2. We approved 20 EP development projects in 2006 after rigorous assessment. A number of projects were turned down, including a US$55 million petrochemical deal in Asia which carried sustainability and governance risks.

Social and Environmental Risk training of our staff continues at a rapid pace. During the year 1,500 employees went through our e-learning training course, while 280 Graduates underwent training in this area and further in depth training was carried out for senior managers. We did not fulfil our commitment to update our intranet with specific policy and sector material in 2006. However the work has begun and will continue in 2007.

We made it a priority in 2006 to begin reporting against the Global Reporting Initiative Financial Services Industry requirements. This was begun and is continuing.

Our 2007 Sustainability Review (PDF, 2.3MB) contains detailed information about our performance and metrics (PDF, 28KB) last year.