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THE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY STREAM IN BANKING ACTIVITY. A EUROPEAN ASSESSMENT

A., BOITAN I.

Abstract

The paper aims at revealing where do European Union's contemporary banking industry stay within the global social and environmental responsibility stream. It is performed a comprehensive review and analysis of the main international frameworks and standards on environmental and societal responsibility, to which financial institutions can make a voluntary and public commitment. The spread of sustainability frameworks across EU countries has been suggestively, visually assessed, by drawing an EU's map for each international standard. The findings show that several countries comprise banks that adhered to all the main four frameworks, while others opted for only one framework. However, the countries distribution with respect to one sustainable standard or another is relatively balanced. From this aggregated, country-level picture the center of interest has shifted toward the individual financial profile of commercial banks that committed to becoming promoters of sustainability in the financial industry. For each sustainable bank it have been computed 9 key financial indicators, namely the market share, the liquidity position, the financial structure, the operational efficiency, profitability, capital adequacy and the individual contribution to the domestic financial depth. The raw values of these indicators, based on data available at 2013 year-end, as well as their descriptive statistics are meant to give an insight, comparatively, into the particularities of their business strategy, to show whether there are similarities across the sustainable banks' financial performance.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SGEMSOCIAL2014/B22/S6.100

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