PETALING JAYA: Malayan Banking Bhd (Maybank) has designed its own Sustainable Product Framework (SPF) – the first by a Malaysian bank – to enable greater development of green, social and sustainable products.
The framework, which will support the group’s commitment of mobilising RM50 billion in sustainable finance by 2025, will be implemented group-wide across Islamic and conventional products effective today.
This framework covers products offered under corporate lending, debt and equity capital markets, trade financing, retail financing, insurance, asset and wealth management, derivatives and deposits.
Maybank chairman Tan Sri Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa (pix) said the bank has introduced such a framework into its business to allow for products and solutions to be designed based on the readiness and needs of its large customer base covering retail, non-retail and large corporates.
The SPF outlines methodologies and procedures to classify and report financial products and services offered by Maybank as sustainable. It also provides classification logic, eligibility criteria, verification processes and exclusion criteria, among others, for products to be recognised as sustainable finance. The framework also specifies qualifying transition elements for various hard-to-abate sectors in line with International Capital Markets Association’s Climate Transition Finance Handbook and the decarbonisation pathway set by Transition Pathway Initiative.
The SPF is applicable to all financial products and services that integrate ESG criteria into business or investment decisions to bring about sustainable development outcomes or contribute positively to the achievement of the Paris Agreement goals and United Nations-Sustainable Development Goals.
The implementation of this framework comes on the heels of Maybank almost reaching its half-way mark of its RM50 billion sustainable financing target by 2025. The bank has mobilised more than RM13.6 billion in sustainable finance in FY2021 and RM10.3 billion as at June 30, 2022 (H1’22), already exceeding its FY2022 target of RM9 billion in sustainable finance. Over 80% of the H1’22 sustainable financing mobilised has been from Malaysia and Singapore, with the bulk of corporate financing targeted at the property, infrastructure and renewable energy sectors.
