Case study: How La Banque Postale works with its clients and customers to encourage sustainable practices

Stakeholder identification and consultation

Please describe which stakeholders (or groups/ types of stakeholders) you have identified, consulted, engaged, collaborated or partnered with for the purpose of implementing the Principles and improving your bank’s impacts. This should include a high-level overview of how your bank has identified relevant stakeholders, what issues were addressed/results achieved and how they fed into the action planning process.

La Banque Postale regularly engages in consultations and discussions with its stakeholders, primarily including:

• Its shareholders (La Poste Groupe and Caisse des Dépôts);
• The Mission Committee;
• The “Customer Board”;
• Employees, unions, and employee representative bodies;
• Public authorities, local authorities, elected officials, and subcontractors;
• Regulatory bodies such as the European Central Bank, the French Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority (ACPR), and ESMA;
• The French Banking Federation (FBF);
• Sector-specific and institutional initiatives like UNEPFI (especially PRB and NZBA), SBTi, ADEME, Institut de la Finance Durable, Finance for Biodiversity, and the Observatory on Corporate Social Responsibility (Observatoire de la responsabilité sociétale des entreprises – ORSE);
• NGOs, particularly those affiliated with the Club de l’Initiative think-tank;
• Non-financial rating agencies.

The Group has partnered with The Shift Project to draft its “Cahiers de la résilience,” which aim to provide local authorities with insights on transitioning towards regional resilience. It also collaborates with the I4CE research institute to model scenarios for financing local investments in climate action.

In 2021, La Banque Postale joined forces with WWF France to promote financial policies that support climate change mitigation, nature conservation, and the transformation of consumption habits and behaviours.

How did La Banque Postale work with its clients and customers to encourage sustainable practices and enable sustainable economic activities?

In its 2023 Universal Registration Document La Banque Postale reports that it works with its clients and customers to encourage sustainable practices and enable sustainable economic activities as follows:

Since 2022, La Banque Postale’s “Customer Board” has collaborated with the Executive Committee. Its objective is to gather customer feedback three times a year on the Bank’s projects and strategic decisions aimed at enhancing its product offerings. The Board consists of ten members who reflect the diversity of La Banque Postale’s customer base. This initiative strengthens the Bank’s effort to involve customers in the transition process. For example:

• Impact personal car and green home improvement loans allow customers to finance projects while caring for the planet.
• Impact home loans offer a reduced rate for purchasing energy-inefficient properties along with renovation projects.
• The Intérêts Solidaires service enables customers to donate interest from their Livret A, Solidarity and Sustainable Development (LDDS), or National Savings (LEP) accounts to associations.
• La Banque Postale Asset Management offers a solidarity fund and four charity funds, providing a practical solution for financing non-profit projects in France, allowing retail customers to support the development of a more socially and environmentally friendly responsible, sharing society through their investment choices.
• The Carbo solution helps individuals estimate their carbon footprint based on banking expenses, compare it with peers, and get personalized advice to reduce it.
• KissKissBankBank & Co facilitates participation through “crowd for good” platforms.
• KissKissBankBank allows donations and pre-orders for entrepreneurial, non-profit, and creative projects.
• Lendopolis, a crowdlending platform specializing in renewable energy and real estate.
• Goodeed, a platform for free donations that allows users to financially support solidarity projects by watching advertisements.
• Microdon, the company behind the initiative of rounding up purchases and rounding down salaries.
• Youmatter, a platform and training organization, engages citizens and professionals in major social and environmental issues.

For business customers, La Banque Postale’s Corporate and Investment Bank (CIB) has positioned itself as a socially responsible CIB. The Sustainable Banking Hub assists customers in structuring financing around CSR criteria. It also helps develop a universal CSR offering (green loans, social loans) and advises customers on integrating CSR strategies into financial products like impact loans, green bonds, and social bonds. These initiatives support the Bank’s other offerings and enable businesses and local authorities to contribute to the just transition. Examples include:

• Green loans for local authorities to fund high-environmental-impact projects (e.g., waste recovery, public building energy refurbishment, renewable energy production, clean transport). Since 2022, these loans have adhered to the EU sustainable development taxonomy.
• Social loans for local authorities to fund socially beneficial projects such as education, healthcare, or regional cohesion.
• Carbo’s “business” solution which enables organizations to perform an ADEME-certified carbon footprint analysis and manage their reduction strategy.

In 2021, La Banque Postale initiated the development of an Impact Weighting Factor (IWF) to assess environmental, social, and local community impacts, such as a project’s carbon footprint or biodiversity impact. The IWF is gradually being applied to each customer and transaction. In this way, its uses (awareness-building, transparency, loan approval process, pricing, etc.) will cut across all the business lines and corporate functions. By 2023, the metric was implemented in the Asset and Project Finance, Commercial Real Estate Finance, and Home Loans divisions. Its introduction to the Home Loans business enabled the launch of impact home loans, which tie the interest rate to the property’s Weighting Factor. The broader aim is to transform La Banque Postale’s overall footprint and quantify its societal impact while ensuring proactive legal compliance.

Finally, the Bank’s corporate loan and investment activities are guided by the Responsible Financing and Investing Charter. In addition, La Banque Postale is gradually adopting strict sector-specific policies to ensure its balance sheet, customers, and society become more resilient to future transition challenges.

UN Principles for Responsible Banking: Accelerating a positive global transition for people and the planet

With over 300 signatory banks representing almost half of the global banking industry, the Principles for Responsible Banking are the world’s foremost sustainable banking framework. Through these Principles, the banking community takes action to align core strategies, decision-making, lending and investment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and international agreements such as the Paris Climate Agreement.

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References:

This case study is based on published information by La Banque Postale, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original please revert to the following link:

https://www.labanquepostale.com/content/dam/lbp/documents/investisseurs/info-reglementee/docref/2024/LBP_URD_2023.pdf

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