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NPA Consulting were tasked with creating a comprehensive ESG strategy for a well-known banking organisation. The complexity in this challenge was built around the fact that we had to assess the bank’s ongoing efforts while simultaneously building a robust strategy for the future.

The team concurrently took stock of the ongoing existing activities around ESG within the bank while further building a cohesive strategy and determining what opportunities to pursue based on rapidly evolving stakeholder demands. To be both efficient and successful, the team had to prioritise efforts in key areas.

A vital step in building and executing an ESG strategy is a materiality assessment to identify, prioritise, and validate ESG topics of importance to the Client and its stakeholders.

We directly engaged at all levels in the Bank on a regular basis to learn their priorities and answer any questions that they had about our approach. Creating ongoing and proactive engagement with a diverse range of stakeholder groups help continue to expand the Client’s ESG strategy in order to reflect the priorities of shareholders, their clients, team members, suppliers, government, regulators, and local communities.

Collaboration with internal teams to build the strategy while executing at the same time, the team collaborated across multiple internal corporate functions.

Maintaining good working relationships with the Client’s internal risk team, which is a key partner in assessing emerging risks and regulatory changes.

We worked closely with the Client’s Senior Executive ESG team, chaired by the Executive Vice-President and Chief Legal Officer, comprising of Executive and Senior Vice Presidents from across the bank to champion the enterprise wide ESG strategy.

Another core aspect of executing an ESG strategy involves staying in tune with external ESG frameworks and how they are changing. The biggest driver of this challenge is the constant evolution in standards, which include those outlined in the Global Reporting Initiative, the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and regulatory bodies such as the FCA whom the IFRS standards recently included Sustainability reporting as part of their framework, as well as the ongoing convergence and alignment of standards among some of these organisations.

Creating and executing an ESG strategy is complex and entails big, multifaceted challenges around ESG. As the regulatory requirements evolve, there is an increasing need to train employees broadly on ESG, such as what net zero means. Currently, the team is conducting a broad education initiative across the bank on ESG concepts and what ESG means to the bank.

Data governance is another focus area, of course. Detailing the importance of specifying the holistic processes, the ESG process owners, data owners, and their specific roles and responsibilities through the data journey across internal functions. More specifically, this entails:


Our Work Resulted in:

  • Delivering a new group wide ESG Strategy
  • Carefully and logically documenting each of the bank’s ESG commitments
  • Determining the processes needed to achieve ESG commitments vs existing current state operational processes.
  • Identified data requirement, as well as the owners of the data and the IT data systems involved.
  • ESG reporting framework
  • New ESG Sustainability reports for stakeholders and clients
  • Outlined the roles of risk, compliance, and finance teams in disclosure reviews.
  • Delivered a programme plan and workstream projects to deliver the new ESG Strategy.

 

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