Nordea ranks as one of world’s most sustainable banks

Nordea was ranked as one of the top 100 most sustainable corporations in the world by Corporate Knights for the second year in a row.

As the only Nordic bank to qualify among the top 100, Nordea climbed the ranking from number 86 to 47, said an official press release.

The 2019 Global 100 ranking was announced today at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“I’m proud that our hard work to integrate sustainability into our business has been recognised. During the past two years, we’ve raised the bar in relation to our work on sustainability and sustainable finance. Together with our customers and partners, we believe we can – and should – enable the transition to a sustainable future. Being ranked among the 100 most sustainable companies in the world shows that we’re on the right track,” said Group CEO Casper von Koskull.

Corporate Knights, a specialised media and investment research firm, analysed 7,536 companies against global industry peers based on 21 key performance indicators. Nordea achieved this strong result thanks to top quartile performance on revenues generated from clean financing activities such as green bonds, green mortgages and green loans, board gender diversity and industry leading carbon and energy productivity.

“The high ranking we received for our clean financing activities is most likely the result of an increase in our green product range in 2018. In addition to our existing offering of green bonds, we added green loans to corporates and green mortgages to our household customers,” said Sasja Beslik, Head of Sustainable Finance at Nordea.

Nordea was one of the first banks in Europe, and the first in the Nordics, to offer green loans to customers. Like green bonds, green loans are used to finance specific investments with environmental benefits and give our customers the opportunity to address climate change in their financing.