Case study: How TMB promotes financial inclusion

What are the material issues the company has identified?

In its 2019 Sustainability Report TMB identified a range of material issues, such as customer experience, digital transformation, data privacy and protection, market conduct, responsible lending. Among these, promoting financial inclusion stands out as a key material issue for TMB.

Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:

“The reporting organization shall identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations and interests.”

Stakeholders must be consulted in the process of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.

Key stakeholder groups TMB engages with:

To identify and prioritise material topics TMB engaged with its stakeholders through the following channels:

What actions were taken by TMB to promote financial inclusion?

In its 2019 Sustainability Report TMB reports that it took the following actions for promoting financial inclusion:

• Launching the TMB Smart Port
• The TMB Smart Port is the first full service for investment portfolio management, specifically designed by TMB to adjust the investment portfolio according to market conditions. This new service offers widening wealth services to mainstream customers and to those who are interested in investing in funds and want to build their financial wealth, but do not know how to manage their portfolios and do not have time to watch the market.

• Introducing the TMB Experience
• The “TMB Experience” is a new concept branch, offering engaging experience that combines digitisation with a human touch to enable customers to enjoy discovering their real financial needs through an ‘Avatar’ identity creation and exploring products and services which can help them reach their financial goals. The aim is to allow customers to understand their own financial needs and objectives effectively with the assistance of both digitised tools and TMB branch personnel. Customers will not be forced to buy any products, but once they are ready to purchase, they will be offered the products and services on a need-based basis to make sure that they can get more benefits in accordance with the TMB Get MORE proposition.

• Offering the instant loan on TMB TOUCH
• TMB launched the instant loan on TMB TOUCH, where customers can instantly, easily, and conveniently apply for loans or credit cards via TMB TOUCH with no documents required and approval decisions made known to customers immediately.

• Introducing two new unsecured loans for small-sized businesses
• TMB introduced two new unsecured loans for stock investment and to increase financial liquidity in collaboration with Lazada Thailand, an e-commerce platform, for online merchants. These products were developed to address the pain and needs of small-sized businesses, who struggle or do not have access to secure loans for their businesses. Securing loans requires countless documents and time-consuming processes, which have been barriers for small-sized business. Now they can apply for loans with TMB as these loans have streamlined the whole process, making it accessible for the business to secure a loan.

Which GRI Standards and corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed?

The GRI Standard addressed in this case is: Disclosure 203-2 Significant indirect economic impacts

Disclosure 203-2 Significant indirect economic impacts corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1: No Poverty
• Targets: 1.2, 1.4
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3: Good Health and Well-Being
• Targets: 3.8
• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
• Targets: 8.2, 8.3, 8.5

78% of the world’s 250 largest companies report in accordance with the GRI Standards

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References:

1) This case study is based on published information by TMB, 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 original on the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Disclosure Database at the link:

http://database.globalreporting.org/

2) https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/

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