Arion Banki

Arion Bank uses VERA

Instead of the bank’s risk management staff having to go through the annual accounts and sustainability reports of companies, it will be possible to run information directly from VERA.” This saves a huge amount of time and we have high expectations for the solution.

Hlédís Sigurdardóttir, Head of Sustainability

To achieve these ambitious goals, financial institutions not only need to consider their own operations, but also the emissions associated with funded projects, i.e. their loan portfolio and investments. For this, Arion Bank has used VERA, Creditinfo’s sustainability platform, a solution that can be used to analyze and process data on corporate sustainability.

Hlédís Sigurðardóttir, Head of Sustainability at Arion Bank, has used VERA to support Arion Bank’s sustainability journey and says the solution has proven highly successful when it comes to calculating financed emissions, reporting and increasingly in decision-making in sustainability matters.

Standard form and faster calculations

One of the bank’s challenges has been to calculate the carbon footprint of the loan portfolio and its own investments, which fall under Scope 3 according to international regulations. This is particularly important for financial companies, as the emissions of the activities they finance are included in the environmental accounting. Arion Bank has used VERA to process the data related to these calculations, something which was previously very time-consuming. “With VERA , we were able to run most calculations in just a few hours, a process which previously took several weeks to complete manually,” says Hlédís.

Replaces manual work

Hlédís explains that VERA has simplified the bank’s work process and saved both time and money. She mentions that a new addition to Veru , where you can access Taxonomy information, will be very useful in future reporting and thus save considerable manual work.

“Instead of the bank’s risk management staff having to go through the annual accounts and sustainability reports of companies, it will be possible to run information directly from VERA.” This saves a huge amount of time and we have high expectations for the solution,” says Hlédís.

Information on all sustainability factors

Hlédís further emphasizes the importance of looking at all aspects of sustainability, not just environmental factors. She mentions that Arion Bank has assessed sustainability risks within different industries and that the solution has also been used there.

Hlédís says VERA plays an important role in supporting the bank’s sustainability policy and making information about carbon footprints and other sustainability aspects easily accessible. “There is enormous value in skipping the manual work and instead spending time looking at and analyzing information from companies,” Hlédís concludes.