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Corporate Social Responsibility

Creating value and sustainability

We recognise the significant value that our non-financial performance can contribute to creating long-term value and a sustainable business. We therefore seek to find better ways to engage our people and work with our stakeholders to find solutions to key social and environmental issues. As a financial services provider we believe that we can make a genuine difference by addressing a diverse range of issues from financial disadvantage to climate change.

The key elements of our CSR strategy are to improve business performance, build an open and honest culture and engage actively with stakeholders.  We aim to achieve this by focusing on six key areas:

  • governance and accountability
  • creating a great place to work
  • working with our supply chain
  • managing our environmental impacts – both direct and indirect
  • caring for our customers and providing them with products and services to meet their evolving needs and expectations
  • investing in the local communities in which we operate.

Our primary objectives supporting this strategy continue to be:

  • making balanced decisions
  • building trust amongst our employees, customers and other key stakeholders
  • enhancing our reputation.

Our CSR strategy builds on the solid foundation provided by our Corporate Principles, Code of Conduct and Compliance Standards.

To deliver on our strategy we need to understand the direct and indirect impacts, both positive and negative, that are created by our operations, products and services. We also need to be able to identify business opportunities to meet the needs of our employees, customers and other stakeholders in the future.

With this in mind we are working to integrate environmental and social considerations into day-to-day business decision-making and operational practices. This will help build a customer-focused and ethical business where we openly engage in meaningful dialogue with our stakeholders and lead to better decisions and improved business performance.

We believe this will add value to our business by reducing risk, improving our operational efficiency, productivity, products and customer service, as well as creating a great place to work. Benchmarking of our CSR performance and stakeholders’ feedback show we are already making progress.

While all employees have a role to play in ensuring that we continue to make progress certain Executive roles have responsibility for key elements of the CSR agenda. The Human Resources Director is responsible for people issues, the Operations Director for environment and supply chain issues and the Products & Marketing Director for issues relating to community and customers. A CSR Steering Group meets to discuss issues, monitor progress and report to the Bank’s Executive Committee.

This section outlines the main areas of our work in these areas,encompassing;

And also provides access to our recent CSR Reports