« Without a set of reliable metrics shared by all, there can be no effective action. »
Responding as closely as possible to the needs of our customers and, beyond them, meeting the needs of society is the corporate purpose of our Group. In its capacity as a decentralized, cooperative financial institution boasting deep roots at a local and regional level, Groupe BPCE and all its companies with Banque Populaire, the Caisse d’Epargne and Natixis are fully engaged in the energy transition. The current context of climate emergency gives us further reason to speed up and intensify our commitments by making the energy transition one of the priorities of our BPCE 2024 strategic plan.
After signing the Principles for Responsible Banking (PRB) in September 2019 - and thereby committing ourselves to pursuing the strategic alignment of our activities with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the trajectories of the Paris Climate Agreement - we also became a member of the Net Zero Banking Alliance in July 2021.
Whether they are physical or transition risks, the threats posed by climate change to our customers and to our own activities must be addressed methodically and be subject to a specific framework and set of steering procedures. The very stability of our economies and societies depends on it.
Whether our carbon footprint is direct or indirect, it must be aligned with a sustainable environmental scenario. This means measuring the impact of our financing and investment activities and setting short-, medium-, and long-term goals to mitigate their climate related effects. Our ability to measure this impact is one of our most important projects because without a set of reliable metrics shared by all, there can be no effective action. Groupe BPCE is leading the way in this area. After being the first bank to actively manage the climate impact of its assets with the adoption of the Green Weighting Factor for its Corporate & Investment Banking activities, the Group is now gradually extending its work to cover the totality of its lending portfolios via the Green Evaluation Models approach.
For a Group such as ours, taking action to combat climate change means helping all our customers - be they large and medium-sized companies, institutions, or individual customers - to make a successful transition to a low carbon economy. It means taking advantage of everything at our disposal in order to succeed: such as providing our customers with concrete support measures, pursuing a strategic dialogue with them, setting up dedicated funding envelopes, adapting our asset management or insurance solutions to channel savings progressively to companies making their transition or, yet again, seizing the opportunity to forge targeted partnerships around expertise that we do not possess alone. This shift to a decarbonized economy calls for our support, and we are all fully aware that the need for financing in this area will be substantial. But we are ready to rise to this challenge. We boast considerable financial room for maneuver and have forged a determination, shared by all our companies, to play an essential role in this adventure.
Laurent Mignon,
Chairman of the Management Board