Date of Publication: February 21, 2019

Author: Amr ElAlfy & Olaf Weber

Summary:

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting is a common task for many corporations. Because of missing standards and not being mandatory, however, CSR reports are hard to compare and often it is not possible to evaluate corporate social performance based on voluntary reporting. This is also true for the financial industry with its complex and often indirect interactions with the environment and society. Therefore, initiatives such as the Task Force for Climate-related Disclosure (TCFD) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) have developed recommendations to standardize CSR reporting and to make it mandatory. The authors propose to follow these approaches and to standardize CSR reporting in the financial industry by addressing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Finally, the paper argues that the current definitions of materiality that are used to standardize CSR reports is too narrow. Reporting should not only consider sustainability risks for the financial industry, but also positive and negative impacts of the financial industry on sustainable development. Consequently, investors and stakeholders can use CSR reports to evaluate sustainability risks and opportunities of the financial industry.

Link to Full Reading:

https://www.cigionline.org/publications/corporate-sustainability-reporting-case-banking-industry/