Sathapana Bank is committed to act as a responsible partner to create long-term value for our stakeholders in a sustainable manner. We recognize that our business decisions may have the potential to impact surrounding communities and the environment. The bank believes that balancing environmental and social issues with financial priorities is fundamental to sound risk management and a core part of corporate responsibility.

The Board of Directors has overall responsibility for sustainability at Sathapana Bank and considers environmental and social matters in the development of the bank’s strategy. We manage sustainability matters using the following dimensions:

Responsible Financing

Our lending practices may have an impact on environment and society (“ES”). In response to this, we are committed to promoting sustainable development by assessing how our borrowing customers address material risks, including their exposure to environmental and social risks in our credit assessment tools. Our approach to manage ES risks is aligned with our Code of Conduct and Business Ethics (“the Code”).

This commitment is outlined in our Credit Policy for managing ES risk in our lending practices. The policy is supplemented by a new policy on Environmental and Social Sustainability which sets out the performance standards and prohibited transactions (exclusion list) to provide more structured and detailed guidance to identify and assess potential ES risks as part of the credit evaluation process.

Our ES risk assessment approach is centered under the Credit Assessment Unit of Credit Department on the need to ensure that material ES issues are considered for all credit applications and periodic reviews. If any borrowing customer is suspected to have businesses involved in activities that may lead to ES issues or probably classified in the exclusion list, Credit Assessment team will promptly engage the ES responsible officer of the Credit Risk Management Department for consultation. If the borrowing customer is not willing to take actions to adequately manage and mitigate the identified ES issues, we will not accept credit application and re-assess the banking relationship, if any.

Good Corporate Citizenship

As a good corporate citizen, we are conscious about managing our direct environmental footprint and seek to influence our supply chain towards sustainable practices.

Environmental performance indicators

Energy

After its transformation as commercial bank in 2016, its electricity consumption per full-time-employee increased to 6% in 2017 compared to 2016 because of the additional electronic equipment needed to equip for new branch opening, branch conversion, and branch relocation to branded building. In addition, the branches, which were converted, had also served longer business hours to customers.

The gasoline and diesel consumptions also increased to 7.8% in 2017 because we provided some branches with cars to support banking business and operations and we purchased more motorbikes for our new credit agents and SME at branches, too.

Paper and Tissue Usage

The bank had initiated a few paperless and the electronic data plan to contribute to the environmental preservation, where we systematized certain requests such as e-Leave, e-Pay Sip, e-Provident Fund and Intranet as net information sharing between nationwide branches and head office. However, due to staff increment, branches expansion and conversion, and corporate loan growth, the paper and tissue usage increased to 46% and 20% respectively.

Water

The water consumption decreased slightly to 4.8% since vehicle cleaning at the branch’s premise was disallowed in 2017.

Staff