François Bloch, CEO BRD Groupe Société Générale: Our goal is to become a leader in green finance in Romania
Sustainability is high on every company’s agenda these days as pressure from governments, regulators, investors, clients and society as a whole is pushing the business environment to adopt responsible business practices and minimize their…
Sustainability is high on every company’s agenda these days as pressure from governments, regulators, investors, clients and society as a whole is pushing the business environment to adopt responsible business practices and minimize their negative impact on the environment. We have asked our partners from the Sustainability Meets Profitability event to share their views on sustainability and elaborate on their initiatives in this area.
In this interview, François Bloch (in opening picture), CEO of BRD Groupe Société Générale, one of the biggest financial groups in Romania, talks about the group’s sustainability agenda and goals.
“We have important ambitions in the ESG field: to support our clients in the energy transition process and become a leader in green finance in Romania,” François Bloch says.
“As early as 2021, we have positioned ourselves as a pioneer by providing the largest green loan in Romania, worth EUR 250 million, and by brokering the first corporate bond issue linked to sustainability objectives. Our ambition is to provide, by 2025, cumulatively, sustainable financing of over €1 billion,” he adds.
Besides financing sustainable projects, BRD Groupe Société Générale is pushing the sustainability agenda in Romania through the Climate Change Summit, the most important ESG event that has been organized so far in Romania, which will have its second edition in October.
Read the full interview below:
How would you define sustainability in the financial sector?
In the financial sector, which is very complex and has ramifications in most areas of society, we can talk about sustainability in at least two directions.
First, it is about core business, about how banks do their job sustainably. This means concrete actions, from how and to whom you provide finance, to your footprint on society. As you know, across the European banking system, there is a move away from financing certain large polluting industries. Société Générale Group, of which BRD is part, is committed to aligning its portfolios to carbon-neutral trajectories by 2050, prioritizing the most carbon-intensive sectors (oil and gas, coal, power generation) and setting interim targets.
Second: if we look at our footprint on society, we can also approach this from two perspectives. The first is as a producer of carbon emissions. From this perspective, our commitment is to reduce our own carbon emissions by 50% by 2030, by acting on the energy needed for buildings, IT, air travel and the vehicle fleet. We have also decided to ban the use of single-use plastics at the workplace.
