ESG Development in Banks update

After a baby caused a pause in our blogs (worth it!), I am very excited to welcome you back to our brief weekly thoughts on ESG.

If you have read this blog for a while, you might be familiar with our ESG Development Heatmaps. The idea behind them is to try to assess how mature different sectors in the Mexican market are in two fronts: ESG Strategy and ESG Communication. By now, most companies have published their 2021 annual integrated or sustainability reports. We are therefore kick starting the heatmap updates to figure out how much progress each industry had over the year.

A reminder first. Our sector heatmaps are exclusively based on information that is publicly available, and only cover Mexican companies that are publicly listed. In them, we don’t try to assess the depth or breath of the ESG strategies (i.e. we don’t look at what material topics companies are working on, or what kinds of targets they have, as a rating agency probably would). Instead, we assess the process of developing a strategy (did they follow the right steps, are they aligned with the right initiatives) and communicating it to the market. In sum, these heatmaps cover:

1. ESG Strategy: we will measure if there is a formal ESG strategy developed (or in the process of being developed) and whether this strategy is aligned to global initiatives (such as the UN’s SDGs, TCFD, etc.).
2. ESG Communication: we will measure how transparent is the communication regarding ESG and whether the company is reporting under recognized standards.

We start the updates with the Banks sector. Let’s look at what they did over 2021.

Banks

Source: Publicly available company materials

What can we read from this heatmap?

1. There were some updated materiality assessments done during the year, but no materiality assessments from new banks.
2. Public disclosure of KPI goals stayed unchanged, with no bank disclosing KPIs or KPI goals for all its material topics yet.
3. One new company published a TCFD-aligned analysis (Regional). With this, 3 banks have published full TCFD analyses, and one bank has published a partial one.
4. One new company is now aligned with CDP (Regional), joining Banorte and Santander.
5. 63% of the sector published updated sustainability or integrated reports. All of these reports were done under the GRI methodology, and all but one were externally verified. Four of them included SASB indicators as well.

Overall, the Banking sector continues to be a relatively mature sector in terms of ESG. While there are a few laggards that have not really walked the walk yet, the banks that have formalized a strategy have done so very thoroughly. We would like to see more KPIs reporting and more target setting, but overall this was another strong year for the sector.

I hope you found this interesting. As usual, if there is anything we can help you with, or if there is an ESG topic you would like to know more about, please let us know.

Best,

Marimar

CEO, Miranda ESG