Our Business Responsibility

Our Business Responsibility, our chosen terminology for sustainability, embodies the principal dimensions of the group’s triple bottom line approach and, in broad terms, encompasses the three Ps - Profit, People and Planet.

Our Business Responsibility is an integral part of who we are, our culture and values, and how we go about doing things. Designed to evolve over time, driven by circumstance and consideration, our journey remains ongoing.

As a distinctive specialist banking and asset manager group, driven by commitment to our philosophies and values, our purpose is to create sustained long-term wealth, and to finance and foster entrepreneurs.

Beyond that, our principal OBR endeavours revolve around the following philosophy:

In pursuit of sustainable profits we seek to be a positive influence in all our business activities, in each of the societies in which we operate. We do this by empowering communities through entrepreneurship and education, leveraging the value in our diversity, and addressing climate change and our use of natural resources.

Our OBR philosophy seeks to align the interests of shareholders and stakeholders over time, and provides the individual business units and regions with a basis from which to determine their own approach.

The group’s philosophy is not intended to be mutually exclusive, nor exhaustive, but allows us to concentrate, for now, on key focus areas.

Deliberately not driven on a top-down basis, the centre maintains responsibility for oversight, direction, coordination and integration of our OBR efforts while the individual business units provide the principal drivers behind our activities, in a manner that best makes sense to each.