Sustainability Focus Areas
We manage a range of sustainability issues as part of our everyday business operations:
Customers
- Offering the right products in key customer segments
- Customer satisfaction, engagement and advocacy
- Helping customers in financial hardship
- Fair fees and interest rates
- Lending responsibly to customers
- Access to our products and services
People
- Healthy franchise partnership model
- Culture and work environment
- Employee engagement
- Workplace health and safety
- Workforce attraction and retention
- Diversity and inclusion
- Remuneration including link to long-term performance
Economic and financial
- Market risk
- Changes to or a deterioration in economic conditions
- Sustainability of housing prices
- Balance sheet strength
- Efficient expenditure and use of resources
- Shareholder returns
Risk, compliance, governance and operations
- Credit risk
- Operational risk
- Ethics and business conduct (including risk culture)
- Identifying and responding to external fraud
- Simplifying processes and procedures
Environment
- Climate change and weather events
- Environmental risk of customers we lend to
- Environmental impact of our own property, assets and operations
Technology
- Changes in technology
- Digitising operations
- Information and cyber security
- Digital disruption
Other
- Changes in regulation and government policy
- Litigation risk
- Strategic partners
- Stakeholder engagement
- Brand and reputation
- Financial literacy of Australian population
- Community contribution
To determine the most important sustainability issues for us, we conduct an annual assessment of industry trends – referencing internal and external reports and independent research. We also conduct a materiality assessment by engaging with internal and external stakeholders. The assessment offers a clear picture of the issues that have the potential to impact our value creation over the short, medium and long-term. As a result, we are able to direct our efforts and resources to these most pressing emerging risks and opportunities.
This year, we found that the issues identified as being the most important are as follows:
- Supporting economic & customer resliance
- Data protection & governance
- Customer experience & product responsibility
- Conduct, governance & culture
- Climate change, sustainable finance & environment
- Workforce empowerment & capability
For more information on how we manage these sustainability focus areas please refer to the FY20 Sustainability Report.
