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One of the world’s leading international banks has stepped up its commitment to CSR by creating a board-level Corporate Responsibility and Community Partnership Committee to sit alongside its three existing board committees.
Standard Chartered, which employs over 30,000 people in more than 50 countries, says the new committee will be a formal committee of the board and will meet at least four times a year.
The committee will be led by the bank’s chairman, Bryan Sanderson, and group chief executive Mervyn Davies, and will be served by a high-profile special adviser, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, a former director of Rio Tinto who is co-chair of the World Business Council’s committee on corporate social responsibility and vice-chair of the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on CSR.
‘The activity on CSR has been there for a long time but there hasn’t been a specific governance structure to make sure the aspirations behind our policies are formally aligned with our business strategy’, a bank spokesperson told EP. ‘It was therefore essential that there should be strong representation from the top levels of the business on the committee.’
The global head of project finance and the chief executive of the bank’s African business are among the members of the committee.
One of the bank’s most pressing CSR priorities is dealing with social and environmental risks related to lending, where its approach is based on the Equator Principles in socially responsible project finance, to which it is a signatory.
But it is also looking at responsible selling and marketing, and evaluating approaches that will help it contribute to sustainable development through microfinance initiatives and other measures to assist small and medium-sized enterprises.
The bank will produce its first corporate responsibility report this month.
Standard Chartered, which employs over 30,000 people in more than 50 countries, says the new committee will be a formal committee of the board and will meet at least four times a year.
The committee will be led by the bank’s chairman, Bryan Sanderson, and group chief executive Mervyn Davies, and will be served by a high-profile special adviser, Lord Holme of Cheltenham, a former director of Rio Tinto who is co-chair of the World Business Council’s committee on corporate social responsibility and vice-chair of the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on CSR.
‘The activity on CSR has been there for a long time but there hasn’t been a specific governance structure to make sure the aspirations behind our policies are formally aligned with our business strategy’, a bank spokesperson told EP. ‘It was therefore essential that there should be strong representation from the top levels of the business on the committee.’
The global head of project finance and the chief executive of the bank’s African business are among the members of the committee.
One of the bank’s most pressing CSR priorities is dealing with social and environmental risks related to lending, where its approach is based on the Equator Principles in socially responsible project finance, to which it is a signatory.
But it is also looking at responsible selling and marketing, and evaluating approaches that will help it contribute to sustainable development through microfinance initiatives and other measures to assist small and medium-sized enterprises.
The bank will produce its first corporate responsibility report this month.
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