Sustainable Finance

The role of banks in the sustainability transition and resilience building

The banking sector remains firmly committed to sustainable development, nature protection, and the responsible use of resources, in line with the EU's environmental and resilience objectives. The shift towards green energy and a circular and resilient economy is central to strengthening EU competitiveness, resilience, and strategic autonomy. This commitment remains strong as we navigate a complex and evolving landscape.

Banks cannot mandate the transition on their clients, as sustainability investments must be economically viable and beneficial from the client's perspective. However, banks play a crucial enabling role by supporting clients through early engagement, advisory services, and financing. They raise awareness of ESG risks, integrate long-term considerations into decision-making and pricing, and promote business transformation while safeguarding financial stability, collaborating with key stakeholders to drive the transition.

Our objectives

Our goal is to ensure that banks can support the green transition through coherent, stable and effective and enabling policies, tools and scalable financing mechanism. To achieve this, we advocate for:

Simple, coherent and practical regulatory and non-regulatory framework that fosters the banking sector's ability to support the transition of their clients;
Availability of effective tools, de-risking mechanism and scalable public-private financing;
The financial sector's resilience to ESG risk.

EBF’s contribution to the dialogue on sustainable finance

We work with expert from the banking sector under strategic coordination of senior representatives from the national banking associations. We are focusing on the key aspects of the Sustainable Finance regulation, ESG risk management and supervision but also industry regulation and initiatives beyond regulation increasing economic viability of the transition which is essential for its financing. We are also participating in several cross-sectoral and standard setting initiatives and industry groups at EU and international level and partnering with relevant stakeholders on various initiatives to advance our objectives.