Driving social impact

Everything we do revolves around making social impact. Instead of maximising profits, our priority is to maximise the social impact of our activities. This is reflected in ‘Our Road to Impact’ strategy.

BNG Bank - driven by social impact

We aim to be a go-to partner for our clients by helping them to address the social challenges they have to cope with. We want to be successful at delivering and demonstrating our social impact. To achieve this ambition, we focus on the Dutch public sector and on building strong customer partnerships. We use the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a guide to achieve this. We specifically focus on five SDGs which correspond closely to the activities that BNG Bank finances:

Our ambition

In 2020, we set the ambition to increase our social impact on five SDGs by 10% from 2021 to 2023. This target is ambitious by design, encouraging us to take action as society is facing urgent social challenges.

Our methodology enables us to measure and report on our clients’ impact. We are among the first financial institutions in the Netherlands to do this. As this is a new process, we are eager to learn from the results and experiences and may further enhance our methodology along the way.

How we measure our impact

Client engagement plan

In 2022, we introduced an engagement plan to help steer our clients’ activities and to support them in their efforts to act on these SDGs. Moreover, BNG Bank is determined to manage the reduction of carbon emissions in the loan portfolio with 49% by 2030, in line with the financial sector’s climate commitment. In our climate plan, ‘Going Green’, we outline how we will work to bring emissions from our credit portfolio and those arising from our own operations in line with the 1.5°C target of the Paris Climate Agreement in the coming years.

ESG bonds

By issuing BNG Bank bonds with an ESG label, we offer investors the opportunity to invest in Dutch municipalities and social housing associations and connect proceeds to the sectors’ expenditures relating to the SDGs of the United Nations.

These bonds are issued under our BNG Bank Sustainable Finance Framework (ESG Framework). Through our ESG framework we are able to connect the funds that are raised through the issuance of these bonds and report the impact on the 17 SDGs.
Our ambition is to gradually increase the issuance of ESG Bonds under our Sustainable Finance Framework.