As banks cautiously look beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, they see a world in which growth will heavily depend on their contribution to a more fair and sustainable economy.
For the past year, sustainability took a back seat to the immediate health and economic crisis. But once the COVID-19 pandemic starts to fade, we expect that policy makers, regulators and funding providers will become more vocal about the need for greater adoption of ESG (environmental, social and governance), as stated in our previous blog. We need not to look further than the ECB’s recently published guidance on climate change risk and EBA’s discussion paper on integration of ESG into risk management, which contains regulatory expectations to banks when it comes to ESG and in particular there is the focus on the E.