Analyse the most significant impacts of your banks’ products and services on society, the environment and the economy. Then identify where your bank can realize the greatest positive impacts and reduce significant negative impacts.

Conducting an in-depth impact analysis is the first step to successfully implementing the Principles for Responsible Banking. Banks should:

  • Determine their scope for impact analysis
  • Review the scale of exposure to different sectors
  • Understand the context and what the most relevant challenges and priorities in the countries/regions where the bank operates are
  • Run an analysis to identify the most significant positive and negative impacts of the bank’s products and services (not internal operational impacts)
  • Prioritise the 2 most significant impact areas, by engaging with internal and external stakeholders
  • Assess the intensity/salience for each impact area. This means measuring their current performance and identifying Sustainable Development Goals, national or regional frameworks they want to align with. This work will be important to define their baseline, and prepare them to move to the next stage: target setting.

Signatory banks can find training, peer learning and tools to help with this step in the Members Area.

Guidance on Impact Analysis
  1. Download the Interactive Guidance for impact analysis and target setting, which includes the rationale, requirements, and examples. The guidance will be updated regularly and we encourage banks to send us examples and resources that can be useful to everyone.
  2. Why not also download the check list which includes an example to report Principle 2, and refer to the below document for more details.
  3. An additional In-depth Guidance Document provides more detailed explanations of the requirements for conducting an impact analysis, what data is required, who in your bank you should reach out to, and examples of the external stakeholders your bank could engage with.
Portfolio Impact Analysis Tool

Developed by banks, under the leadership of the UNEP FI, the Portfolio Impact Analysis Tool for Banks is an interactive input-output workflow which requires users to input data to describe their portfolio and to reflect their current impact performance. The tool uses a set of in-built impact mappings to produce a number of outputs, in particular a set of impact profiles by business line. It guides the bank to identify its most significant impact areas and determine priorities, setting the basis for strategy development and target-setting.