The Board of Directors has the overall oversight responsibility in ensuring that sustainability is institutionalized into Chinabank’s strategy and objectives. 

The Management Committee is tasked to ensure that the Bank’s operations and the performance of our personnel are in line with the set objectives on sustainability.

The Management Committee is supported by the newly-established Sustainability Oversight Committee in the implementation of its sustainability-related activities.  

The Sustainability Oversight Committee aims to:   

• ensure that oversight and management of sustainability-related issues are embedded within the Bank’s governance structure and,
  
  
• ensure that the Board and Management would have visibility of sustainability-related issues and set the appropriate strategy and its implementation.
   

To support the Sustainability Oversight Committee’s activities, the Sustainability Working Team, led by the ESG Department, coordinates with the other units of the Bank in the implementation of actions and initiatives on capacity building, materiality assessment, and other activities under the Sustainability Transition Plan.

We engage, listen, and respond to our internal and external stakeholders to understand their concerns and expectations, improve our operations, develop long-term solutions, and foster stronger relationships with them.

Our employees are the heart of our organization. By providing multiple engagement mechanisms, we make sure that our employees’ voices are heard and their insights can contribute to our operations, initiatives, and overall business direction. Chinabank also engages its external stakeholders through numerous channels to ensure that their feedback is well received and addressed. Aside from general engagement and in line with Chinabank’s prudent credit assessment, the Bank exchanges views with its external stakeholders regarding sustainability-related matters such as environment compliance certificate, community clearance, and management structure, among others.  

We believe that meaningful sustainability action begins with clarity. By identifying and understanding the most urgent issues, we can respond with purpose. Our materiality assessments serve this intent, guided by the following objectives:

• To identify and prioritize which economic, environmental, social or governance topic/issue has an impact to, and is impacted by the Bank

• To spot trends and anticipate emerging issues

• To focus efforts on allocating resources better

Assessment by Chinabank officers

To ensure that the respondents have reasonable knowledge of our business and economic activities, Chinabank officers were selected to participate in the materiality assessment based on the broad representation of their business/support function, area, and scope in the organization, expertise, and seniority. Discussions were conducted to ensure understanding of the purpose, process, and validation of the results.

Evaluation of a broad range of potential

We considered various international sustainability principles such as those issued by the Global Reporting Initiative and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. We also incorporated topics of a more generic company rather than focused on banking to have a broader scope and to avoid excluding potential topics. As such, we arrived at a total of 36 material topics.

Focusing on What Matters Most: Chinabank’s top ten material topics 

1. Health and Safety

2. Business Ethics

3. Corporate Governance

4. Talent attraction and Retention

5. Anti-Corruption and Anti-Bribery

6. Digitalization

7. Labor Standards

8. Training and Education

9. Innovation

10. Economic Performance

We use a range of resources and relationships (or “capitals”) to create value for our stakeholders. These are grouped under 6 capitals and they are summarized as follows:

Placing a strong emphasis on transparency and accountability, Chinabank’s 2024 Annual Financial and Sustainability Report highlights the material financial and non-financial activities of the Chinabank Group for the period January 1 to December 31, 2024.

The report has been prepared in line with the standards and/or guidelines provided by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), ASEAN Corporate Governance Scorecard and in accordance with the GRI Sustainability Reporting Standards.

In addition, the report partially applies the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards IFRS S1 and IFRS S2 as issued by the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). We plan to achieve full compliance with IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards when sufficient sustainability data becomes available, and after we have further refined our control systems and processes for sustainability disclosure. 

The Chinabank Board of Directors is ultimately responsible for the Bank's sustainability strategy, while Management is responsible for its implementation and for the preparation and fair presentation of the sustainability report for the year ended December 31, 2024, in accordance with the sustainability reporting framework mentioned above.

The Board of Directors reviews and approves the sustainability-related statements, and submits the same to the stockholders.

2024 Annual Financial & Sustainability Report