Local Savings Banks distribute a significant proportion of their earnings annually to support local vitality and wellbeing.

The 2022 Good Deeds campaign saw Savings Banks and trusts donate over EUR 1.5 million. The wellbeing of children and young people was particularly highlighted in the donations. Donations were also made to help Ukraine.

Allowing our customers to choose the most suitable service channel and ensuring that using our services is easy, safe and flexible are key priorities for us. We want our operations and services to enable a better life for our customers. In 2022, the average response time of our customer service for private customers was just 1.31 minutes.

Our excellent performance in the EPSI Rating customer satisfaction survey was also a significant achievement related to supporting the financial wellbeing of our customers. Satisfaction with Savings Banks among both private and corporate customers exceeded the industry average by a clear margin. Savings Bank ranked fourth in the industry’s customer satisfaction survey in 2022 in both the private customer category (74,9) and the corporate customer category (71.4). In 2022, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) for customer negotiations was 81.6, which is excellent, and higher than in the previous year (80.8).

We carried out an extensive stakeholder survey, which revealed that sustainability and profit are equally important for most of our customers. We are committed to taking environmental, social and governance issues into account in our investment activities.

One of the competitive advantages of Savings Banks’ Asset Management is its leading role in impact investment through our Ympäristö special investment fund. The fund’s investments focus on climate change mitigation and environmental innovation.

We updated our Responsible Investment Policy in 2022 and developed the integration of responsibility into our investment processes. We made preparations for the EU’s sustainable finance regulations with regard to, for example, product-specific pre-contractual templates pursuant to the SFDR and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive obligations pertaining to the assessment of customers’ sustainability preferences. We also developed sustainability assessment processes and guidelines with regard to our products as well as the collection of data via our ESG tools. Towards the end of the year, we also updated the climate scenario analyses and stress tests of our equity and fixed income funds.

We also evaluated the net impact of investment funds with regard to environmental, health-related and social factors, for example. The net impact was positive. This indicates that, on average, our funds have more positive than negative impacts. The main positive net impacts were related to society, such as tax payments, job creation and social infrastructure. We also assessed the extent to which our funds’ investment targets support the UN Sustainable Development Goals that guide global development efforts up to 2030. We also conduct regular analyses of the sustainability scores and ratings of the funds we manage, as well as their carbon footprint, carbon risk and positive environmental impacts.

In 2022, we increased general awareness of responsible investing in shared meetings of the investment function and the asset management functions, at Savings Bank events, blogs, as well as held external training activities for the distributors of our funds.

At the Savings Banks Group, we strongly support entrepreneurship and want to promote the creation and development of an entrepreneurial environment and conditions in Finnish society.

We support the conditions for our corporate customers’ success by monitoring trends and changes in the general operating environment, assessing the impact of identified changes on the operating conditions of companies, and providing information on the changes and concrete solution alternatives to entrepreneurs. We also support our corporate customers in the green transition and the achievement of their sustainability targets.

As part of its social responsibility, the Savings Banks Group applied for and received two new European Investment Fund guarantee programmes in 2021 to strengthen the general prerequisites of its business financing. These guarantee programmes, similarly to the extensive utilisation of Finnvera’s guarantee programmes in corporate financing, and the granting of individual instalment-free periods in order to strengthen liquidity, also served as concrete support for the general operating prerequisites of corporate customers of Savings Banks in 2021.

In 2021, we organised various events, information briefings and webinars for companies and entrepreneurs, and we also launched a financial discussion service for corporate customers to support our range of financing solutions.

The Savings Banks Group aims to be carbon positive in its own operations (scope 1 and 2) by 2035. The interim target is to reduce the carbon footprint of the electricity consumption of operating locations by 50 per cent (compared to 2021) by the end of 2030 at the latest.

As a key measure related to the reduction of CO2 emissions in our own operations and the mitigation of climate change, we participated in the national Down a Degree campaign to save energy in 2022: we implemented energy saving measures in cooperation with property owners in areas such as heating, ventilation, lighting, water consumption, automation, reduction of the use of advertising lights and energy efficiency of equipment. We also started to build the WWF Green Office environmental management system at eight of our locations, and we will expand the measures to other locations later.