We are pleased to present the results that BPER Banca Group has achieved in the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) field over the past year.  

In a period characterized by a particularly challenging macroeconomic context, the progress made and the commitment shown by the Group in response to climate change and growing economic and social inequalities take on a particular meaning. This is further enhanced by having already consolidated in 2023 the strategic objectives included in the 2022-2025 BPER e-volution Business Plan.  

The climate crisis has highlighted the urgent need to adopt concrete measures to reduce environmental impact and to counteract the extreme climatic events that have affected various regions of our country: Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany are a sad testimony. We also believe that the intensification of economic and social inequalities is a phenomenon to focus on and to which to dedicate the greatest efforts, offering our contribution to mitigate them.  

The 2023 Report of the Alliance for Sustainable Development (ASviS) continues to underline how some millennium sustainability goals - poverty reduction, the fight against climate change and the promotion of gender equality - remain very challenging objectives and require the concrete commitment of all actors: from institutions, to civil society, to economic operators.  

In this context, the increasingly widespread attention to ESG issues and the stimulus deriving from European legislation have made the commitment to sustainability policies mandatory for all economic operators.  

The 2023 Non-Financial Consolidated Statement of the BPER Banca Group represents a substantial evolution: anticipating by one year the requests of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), this document, for the first time, is included in the Report of the Administrators on the management of the Group. A step that definitively sanctions the penetration of ESG factors into the growth strategy of our Group.  

In 2023 we launched a series of initiatives aimed at mitigating the contribution of the BPER Banca Group to greenhouse gas emissions and we carried out projects for the benefit of civil society, among which we mention:  

• the enrichment of the ESG product portfolio available to our customers to undertake the transition path towards a low carbon economy and with a positive social impact;  

• the approval of the first portfolio decarbonization objectives, consistent with the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which we have adhered to since 2022 and those of financial inclusion, as required by the Principles for Responsible Banking, to which we adhered in 2021;  

• the issuance, at the beginning of February 2024, of our first green bond;  

• the constant and convinced commitment on Diversity&Inclusion issues, witnessed by the achievement in advance of the first objectives of the three-year D&I project;  

• fundraising for important social causes: we mention among all the project carried out in collaboration with the Italian Red Cross for 5 million Euros (1 million Euros for the earthquake in Turkey and 4 million Euros for the flood in Emilia-Romagna), the initiative carried forward with D.i.Re (Women in Network Against Violence) for 250,000 Euros and WWF for 110,000 Euros;  

• the “B-education: ideas that are worth” project, an important and innovative national project on financial education and sustainability that involved over 1,900 students and 60 Italian universities.  

Finally, we have obtained improvements in ESG ratings, including the CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project), which has promoted us to Leadership level (A-) and S&P, which has included us among the 25 best Italian companies in the S&P Global Sustainability Yearbook 2024.  

These projects and the goals we have achieved confirm the Bank’s ability to generate value and shared benefits for all our stakeholders.  
 

We would like to thank the people who made all this possible: their conscious and incessant commitment has definitely gone beyond the sharing of objectives, managing to translate them into concrete actions until making the ESG commitment a characterizing element of BPER’s identity.  

We will continue to look to the future with hope without lacking our commitment because we believe that together we can be the spark that can give life to a better future for everyone.  
 

Thank you and enjoy your reading.