‘Banking for Impact’ is the name of a new consortium including Harvard Business School, Impact Institute, ABN AMRO, DBS, UBS and Danske Bank. The new consortium proposes a new impact reporting system to measure environmental and social effects of all banking activities.

“Danske Bank is fully committed to increasing awareness and action for sustainable progress. It is a fundamental element of how we will develop the bank going forward, as we believe that sustainability is essential for creating lasting value for all our stakeholders while contributing to solving society’s challenges”, says Carsten Egeriis, CEO at Danske Bank, and explains the motivation for co-founding the consortium:

“Developing an approach for measuring and analysing our impact will benefit our stakeholders as it will allow us to take better decisions, create better transparency and, not least, allow us to systematically decrease our negative impacts while increasing our positive impacts on society and nature.”

Scaling up impact measurement
The new reporting rules will pull positive and negative externalities like for instance job creation and pollution into standard practices to provide a well-rounded picture of how financial companies create impact.

This type of standards are also known as Impact Measurement and Valuation (IMV) and the key goal is to create an approach, which, in addition to being rigorous, is also feasible to implement for a wider set of banks.

“Financial institutions are in a unique position to pave the way for the transition to an impact economy. However, the financial industry does not have tailored and scalable methods to measure its positive and negative impact across the value chain. The Banking for Impact initiative will aim to address this, and our hope is that other banks will join our already strong group of founding banks in the further development of a common methodology,” says Kristina Øgaard, Head of Sustainability Strategy & Governance at Danske Bank, who also represents the Bank in the Steering Committee of the Banking for Impact initiative.