Our sustainability year: Top 10 highlights

Our sustainability year: Top 10 highlights from the 2015 Teachers Mutual Bank Annual Report and Sustainability Update

Over the past 12 months we have further improved our position as a sustainable business leader, demonstrating that sustainability and profitability are not mutually exclusive.

We continue to strive to be an ethical and sustainable business, and continually benchmark ourselves against industry leaders from around the world. 

Highlights in FY2015 include:

1. Reporting our performance against 96 targets and KPIs, ensuring that sustainability as a core value is embedded across the business.

2. Maintaining our position on Ethisphere’s list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies for 2015. This year we were one of only two Australian companies to be named on the list, and one of only five banks.¹

3. Raising the bar with an increased community investment rate of 4.55% of pre-tax profits, as measured by the LBG². This rate is 9.3 times the LBG Australian and New Zealand average, and 3.1 times the LBG Global average. The total community investment is $1.67 million.

4. Being named ‘Best Bank in Socially Responsible Performance’ at the prestigious 2015 Australian Banking and Finance Awards. Assessed against the best performing banks in the Australian financial sector, we are proud to be number one for environmental, social and governance (ESG).³ 

5. Strengthening our lending policy on climate change. Australians are becoming increasingly aware of the environmental impacts of the fossil fuel industry.  We have always maintained a solid stance against lending to and investing in large-scale greenhouse gas polluting activities. This year we took the additional step of formally introducing these exclusions into our Lending Risk Policy and Treasury Credit Risk Management Policy. 

6. Pioneering the new frontier of ethical investment.  Teachers Mutual Bank’s $500 million Debt Issuance Programme has been certified by the RIAA (The Responsible Investment Association of Australasia) on the basis that Teachers Mutual Banks’ Policy is ‘the exclusion of lending to, or investing in, large scale greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuel exploration, extraction, production and use’.⁴ 

• It is the first certified ethical investment wholesale cash product in Australia
• It is the first certified ethical investment wholesale cash product that is based on fossil fuel lending and investing exclusion.
• Teachers Mutual Bank is the only bank in Australia with a certified ethical investment wholesale cash product, the proceeds of which are used to fund the balance sheet.

7. Through achieving Certification, Teachers Mutual Bank is recognised as a certified ethical bank.⁵

8. Attained high scores on key metrics;

• Women Board Members 44%
• Employee satisfaction 86%
• Staff engagement 87%
• Member satisfaction 94.4%.

9. Ranked in the CSR Top Ten in the ACCSR 2015 Review of the State of CSR in Australia and New Zealand.⁶ The review is the largest ongoing survey of CSR practice and performance in Australia. Our score of 94% in CSR Management far exceeded the finance and insurance industry average (74%) and the all-industry average of (76%). We also scored 93% for CSR Innovation. 

10. Introduced a volunteer leave program enabling all employees to take one day off a year to volunteer for a charitable initiative. 

Download the full report

References

1. The Ethisphere Institute is a global leader in defining and advancing standards of ethical business. The World’s Most Ethical Companies, awarded by Ethisphere, recognises companies that not only promote ethical business standards and practices internally, but also exceed legal compliance minimums and shape future industry standards by introducing best practices today (www.ethisphere.com).

2. The London Benchmarking Group (LBG) measurement framework is the internationally recognised standard for measuring and evaluating a corporation’s community investment(www.lbg-australia.com). Results published in November 2014 are based on investment figures from the previous financial year.

3. Awarded by the Asia-Pacific Banking & Finance Magazine, the Best Bank in Socially Responsible Performance. The Award recognises companies who demonstrate solid performance across three sustainability priority areas: environment, social and governance.

4. The Responsible Investment Association Australasia (RIAA) is the peak industry body representing responsible and ethical investors across Australia and New Zealand. Through achieving certification,Teachers Mutual Bank is recognised as a certified ethical bank. The Teachers Mutual Bank wholesale debt issuance programme has been certified by RIAA according to the strict disclosure practices required under the Responsible Investment Certification Program. See www.responsibleinvestment.org for details.

5. See above.

6. The Australian Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (ACCSR) is a pioneer in corporate social responsibility in Australia and a leader in stakeholder-based methodologies to address sustainability risk management