VTBR.L Regulatory News (VTBR)

VTB Bank's Sustainable Development Strategy for 2022 - 2025 has been approved

The Supervisory Board of VTB has approved VTB Bank's Sustainable Development Strategy for 2022-2025. It includes five key areas of work to achieve VTB's sustainable development goals, reflecting aspects of the Bank's activities that are significant for the environment, society and business.

Chairman of VTB Supervisory Board, Dmitry Grigorenko said:

"VTB is not just a systematically important bank that ensures the stability of the Russian financial system, the Bank is also a reliable partner in ensuring sustainable development of the country. Society, business and government must effectively respond to global challenges cohesively. Banks have always been drivers of new solutions, tools and approaches to business, and today VTB confirms its commitment to reaching our common goals: creating a comfortable environment for life in Russia, decent working conditions and successful entrepreneurship, and developing the well-being of our country's residents."

President and Chairman of VTB Management Board, Andrey Kostin said:

 "Open and mutually beneficial partnership has always been the basis of VTB's business philosophy. We believe that achieving sustainable development goals is possible only by working in such partnership, and this principle is at the heart of our ESG strategy. Its implementation will create long-term value and mutually beneficial effect for all partners of the Group, increase the level of loyalty of customers and employees of the Bank and thereby will directly affect the market value of our shares and the attractiveness of the bank to investors."

 The five key areas of work to achieve VTB's sustainable development goals set in the Strategy are as follows:

Creating financial opportunities to improve life quality: For VTB, the key factor of the sustainable development agenda is the social one. The Bank was the first to implement programs of direct support for families with children and pensioners, provided free protection for pensioners' funds from fraudulent activities, implemented unique solutions that allowed the combination of federal, regional and banking programs on preferential mortgages, and for the Far East to offer a mortgage at a rate of 0.1%. In the Far East region, VTB intends to maintain a leading position in the market, develop social support for clients, help to improve their financial well-being, develop socially responsible lending practices, create opportunities for clients to participate in social and environmental initiatives, and increase the affordability of housing by developing mortgage instruments. VTB plans to take a stable leading position in terms of accessibility, inclusiveness and loyalty.

Contribution to sustainable economic development: VTB has created a centre for providing expertise and advice to clients on sustainable development issues. Solutions are being actively developed to attract financing, operations in carbon markets, as well as to develop the responsible and green investments. An important aspect is the further expansion of opportunities and support programs for the development of small business and entrepreneurship.

Promotion of social development across regions: VTB intends to continue expansion of charitable, sponsorship and partnership programs to support medicine, sports, culture, ecology and education in the regions where the Bank operates. Together with its partners, VTB implements major educational projects to build human resources in the financial sector in the areas of management, digitalization, data analysis and risk management.

Embedding ESG into employee development: The bank sets itself the goal of further improving the competencies of its employees, their professional development and increasing involvement, dissemination as well as the improvement of well-being resources.

Sustainable development of the Bank: This area includes the integration of ESG factors into the corporate governance system and the integrated risk management system (regular stress testing taking into account ESG factors from 2022 and the extension of ESG scoring to the entire loan portfolio starting from 2023), building a responsible procurement practice (establishing ESG criteria for 100% purchases starting from 2023), as well as Investments in environmental business projects and the reduction of environmental impact. The Bank is committed to achieving carbon neutrality in its operations by 2030.

 REFERENCE:

VTB is a pioneer of the responsible finance market in Russia, and was involved in organizing ESG bonds worth over $ 3.7 billion. In May 2020, VTB was the first in Russia to launch two responsible investment funds. The Bank actively finances environmental projects: over RUB 65 billion have been allocated for such purposes. In October 2021, VTB Group launched the ESG platform - a fully open infrastructure for ESG transformation, which includes a set of financial products and services that meet environmental, social and corporate governance standards. In total, the perimeter of the ESG platform has already included about 20 areas of VTB Group activities. This list will be expanded.