Enabling banks to transition to responsible and sustainable banking
Meaningfully adopting Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles is becoming increasingly imperative for banks. There is not only a growing push from governments globally mandating ESG adoption, but there is also a rise of eco-conscious customers who demand green banking products. Given this dynamic ESG landscape, navigating risks as well as opportunities with a calibrated technology solution becomes key.
Banks need a robust technology solution that aligns with their strategy, sustainability plans, as well as profitability. Our suite of pricing, billing, and revenue management products are designed to help banks consider environment, social, and governance parameters to enable you and your customers make tangible, faster, and more deliberate progress towards achieving your ESG goals.
Corporate banks that integrate our product suite with an ESG assessor can:
Personalize products/services/offers to existing and new customers using objective sustainability parameters.
Incentivize corporate customers to become more sustainable through partnerships with third-party assessors and rating agencies who are part of their ecosystem.
Make faster progress in their own ESG journeys, thus improving their own sustainability ratings.
We have collaborated with sustainable rating providers such as EcoVadis, the world’s largest and most trusted provider of business sustainability ratings that has a global network of more than 100,000+ rated companies. They evaluate how well a company has integrated the principles of sustainability and CSR into their business and management systems. SunTec ESG Solution can directly access the sustainability score from the rating provider’s platform. Banks can use this objective indicator of a company’s commitment to the environment to promote “green behavior” by their corporate customers in the following ways:
Your bank can use sustainability ratings generated by credible assessors as additional criteria to determine preferential pricing and benefits for various banking products and services. For example, you can reward customers with higher sustainability scores with a better discount or preferential interest rate. The entire process is automated, secure, and scalable.
When onboarding new customers, your bank can make disclosure of sustainability ratings mandatory. This data can be used to provide tiered benefits to customers based on the progress they make over time in terms of improving sustainability scores.
By adding third-party assessors to your ecosystem, your bank can facilitate sustainability ratings for customers who have not already been rated. You can facilitate such ratings as part of the overall relationship, either for a fee or as a benefit to select customers. SunTec Ecosystem Monetization and Partner Management module can be used to manage revenue sharing and settlement between your bank, the assessor, and the customer. Small & Medium Enterprises that may otherwise not have the resources will especially benefit from such facilitation, thereby strengthening your bank’s relationship with this important customer segment.
When structuring corporate deals with customers, your bank can include calibrated sustainability improvements as a determinant of future benefits. In other words, your bank’s annual review of deal pricing/discounts to prices/fees for each corporate customer will look at not just increases in revenue/volume/margins, but also at improvements in the customer’s sustainability score as reported by the assessor. As part of the deal, your bank can offer sweeteners for achieving green targets or levy penal fees for not meeting them.
Your bank’s Product Management capability can be enhanced to create green variants (potentially in partnership with third parties). For example, offset charges for those corporate customers whose pricing is tied to carbon offset credits projects or net zero carbon goals.
Whatever is your customer’s ‘social’ goals, your bank can benefit from our rating network to get the social performance rating. Measure employee wellbeing metrics (diversity & inclusion, leave policies, pay equity, employee safety, etc.), customer satisfaction metrics (customer satisfaction score, net promoter score, customer feedback and reviews, meeting compliance mandates, etc.), as well as measure how your customer’s business impacts their partners, the community, and society at large (factors that have an impact on society and monitoring business performance in the social area).
Social indicators are an integral part of ESG, and your bank can now push for positive change at corporates whose practices are lagging. Make it easier for your customers to contribute to charities and social causes. You can enable customers to pay out a percentage of their earnings (interest/cashback/dividends) to charitable causes while also providing tax benefits to them. Overtime, this can be offered even globally, so that donors can contribute to non-profit organizations that are driving social action in different countries.
The possibilities are endless. Your bank in conjunction with partners can also design and deliver a range of financial inclusion products, thus offering last mile connectivity of services.
As a bank, there are situations where you are unable to provide complete transparency in pricing and billing to customers either because of process or system constraints. This leads to friction and disputes around pricing, benefits, etc. that can damage valuable customer relationships. With SunTec ESG Solution your bank can provide higher levels of pricing transparency to customers. Such capabilities will not only reduce the risk of repudiation of charges by customers, but will also improve the process of remediation.
We believe that our offering can help your bank create and be part of more symbiotic ecosystems that benefit all partners. Which is why at SunTec, we prefer to see ESG as not just Environment, Social, and Governance, but also as also Empower, Synergize, and Grow.
To know how SunTec can assist your bank in making faster progress on your ESG journey, while also encouraging your customers to embrace ESG, write to us on contactus@suntecgroup.com.
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