Our Strategy: Blue Sustainability
We follow a sustainable financing approach focused on a small number of client groups that are geared towards people’s needs. These include, among others, housing, healthcare, nursing, education, food, agriculture, infrastructure, and renewable energies. In this way, we create value for the environment, society, our employees and customers.
Expand Our Role as a Sustainability Pioneer
Our overarching goal is to be one of the most successful banks in Germany and thus expand our role as a sustainability pioneer among the top 20.
We follow the guiding principle of a net-zero and 1.5 degree-compliant future in accordance with the Paris Climate Agreement. We have set decarbonization targets for the emission-intensive sectors in our loan book, through which we aim to align our portfolio with net zero transformation scenarios.
We are continuously expanding the proportion of business that is in line with the sustainability criteria of our Sustainable Lending Framework (SLF).
Banks are Financing the Transformation
Banks have a central role to play in the transformation of our economy towards greater sustainability. We embrace this responsibility. With our sustainability strategy, we will expand our sustainable measures far beyond the regulatory requirements.
The central guidelines of our understanding of sustainability are the 17 global sustainability goals of the United Nations, also called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In addition to the SDGs, we are also committed to the Paris Agreement. As a bank, we would like to make an active contribution to limiting global warming as a result of human activity to 1.5 degrees, in order to minimise the risks and impact of climate change. Additional UN agreements that we subscribed to in 2021 are the UN Global Compact and the Principles for Responsible Banking. They serve as a compass and help us as a bank to ambitiously improve sustainability.
What Do We Mean by #geldverbesserer?
We are convinced that as a bank we make an important contribution to a sustainable, future-oriented society. Through lending and our products, we channel capital into certain sectors of the economy. This is a great responsibility for the whole financial sector. We focus on selected customer groups.
We exclude the financing of certain industries and projects. Among others, the exclusions include the earmarked financing of coal-fired power generation, the financing of nuclear energy, fracking/exploitation of oil sands, armaments, the mining of and trade in conflict materials and gambling.
We distance ourselves from violations of human rights and international labor standards. DKB is a pure customer bank. It does not engage in investment banking, offshore banking or asset management.
We also do not engage in insider trading or short selling, nor do we promote tax evasion and tax avoidance.
For more information, please read our investment and financing principles.
Our Fields of Action, Targets and Measures
In order to implement sustainability holistically, we are active in different fields of action. We have developed these material topics on the basis of a broad-based materiality analysis with the involvement of our stakeholders:
Sustainability in our corporate governance
Our ESG governance
Our employees
Our contribution to society
Sustainability priorities in our core business
Our sustainable product range
Our contribution to climate and biodiversity protection
We have also set ourselves ambitious targets within the individual fields of action, which we want to achieve within the next few years as part of our sustainability strategy.
Our Sustainability Guidelines
You can find our rules and guidelines on sustainability here: