The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd (ASX: ANZ) share price is on watch during Thursday's session after the company released an investor briefing before the market open.
The briefing is concentrated on the banking giant's ESG approach, and how it is complying with the push towards a sustainable and diverse business model.
ANZ's share price closed at $27.61 yesterday, and therefore it is on watch after the release of this ESG briefing.
Let's investigate a little further.
What did ANZ announce in its ESG update?
ANZ gave a comprehensive overview of its ESG framework, and how ESG factors are embedded into its operations.
The bank went into great detail into each framework of the ESG criterium – Environmental, Sustainability and Governance – and how it ticks the boxes for each of these headings.
For instance, ANZ has "funded and facilitated $14 billion towards sustainable finance", and has completed 55 transactions in its "sustainable finance business" so far in FY21. The transaction volume on these deals is $91 million – definitely no small change.
Another interesting takeout from the briefing was the bank's posture on risk, and its newly formed "risk appetite statement (RAS)".
This is basically a document that states the "degree of risk that ANZ is willing to take", and a "process for monitoring compliance", amongst others.
As such, its assessment of risk now extends to climate risk, biodiversity in environmental sustainability, cyber scamming and economic disparity, as per the release.
The banking giant then gave a series of case examples in its presentation on each of the subsections under the ESG banner, before establishing its future ESG targets.
It intends to "support 10 of the 17 United Nations sustainable development goals", ranging from environmental sustainability to fair and responsible banking.
A big part of its plan to beef up ESG principles in house is ANZ's policies on disclosure, and this came through in the briefing. ANZ outlined its disclosure process, and demonstrated the extent of its transparency, particularly on ESG measures.
The presentation concludes on a similar theme, and investors wanting to find out more on ANZ's ESG policies, disclosures, or annual review of the same can head to the last page (page 50) of ANZ's report and click the links found there.
ANZ share price snapshot
The ANZ share price has had an interesting year and has posted a gain of 22% this year to date. This extends the return over the past 12 months to 60%.
Both of these results have outpaced the S&P/ASX 200 index (ASX: XJO)'s climb of around 25% over the past year.
