“Investment and financing portfolios represent 99% of our emissions. We are in the process of creating dashboards for distinct parts of the business, which will give us better visibility over where our emissions are generated. We can also build emissions trajectories, allowing us to be quite visual in our analysis, and to follow developments day by day”
Background
Crédit Agricole Nord Midi-Pyrénées is one of 39 regional divisions of Crédit Agricole Group, the European Union’s third biggest banking group by assets, and Europe’s biggest asset manager by number of retail customers.
It is a mutualist and co-operative retail bank, offering retail banking and insurance products to individuals and professionals, with a particularly strong presence within the agriculture industry. Crédit Agricole Nord Midi-Pyrénées has 158 branches across four French départements (administrative regions)
Crédit Agricole Group has set a company-wide climate strategy aligned with the objectives of the Paris Agreement, aiming to achieve carbon neutrality by the year 2050. Within this, Crédit Agricole Nord Midi-Pyrénées has for example set a target to reduce its carbon emissions by 46% between 2019 and 2030.
Challenge
As a large financial institution with a stated commitment to sustainability, Crédit Agricole Nord Midi-Pyrénées is facing increasing disclosure demands, as well as scrutiny from customers over its environmental credentials.
In order to comply with regulations including the European Union’s CSRD and France’s Bilan Carbone, and to meet its own internal sustainability targets such as a group-wide goal of carbon neutrality by the year 2050, the bank’s Corporate and Social Responsibility team found itself needing to collate and manage growing and increasingly complex carbon and ESG data sets.
Moreover, as a financial institution, Crédit Agricole Nord Midi-Pyrénées’ emissions fall overwhelmingly into the Scope 3 category. More than 90% of them are “financed emissions” linked to banking products, which are more complex to identify and calculate.
Previously, in order to calculate its carbon footprint and comply with the Bilan Carbone, Crédit Agricole Nord Midi-Pyrénées had relied on manual carbon and ESG data accounting methods which were time-consuming, and poorly suited to collaborative working. The bank had called upon external consultants to assist with these disclosures, but wanted to achieve more autonomy over the process.
“Sweep allows us to have more confidence in our data. It’s extremely simple. The biggest gains so far have been saving time, and no longer necessarily needing assistance from external consultants, because the tool itself brings so much clarity to the process.”
Anne Mayor, the CSR manager at Crédit Agricole Nord-Midi-Pyrénées, explains that Sweep has significantly enhanced the bank’s sustainability data management by saving time, boosting efficiency, and enabling greater autonomy.
She emphasizes that Sweep’s questionnaires have been especially valuable in simplifying this work, meaning that the CSR team no longer has to rely on emails and repeat meetings and follow-ups to collect the necessary data.
Colleagues who are requested to input data into the platform have gained enormously in autonomy. Anne Mayor describes the platform as being fun and easy to learn to use.
The platform’s “load your data once, use it everywhere” principle has proved to be particularly beneficial for the bank, given its need to comply with a variety of regulatory requirements including the CSRD and Bilan Carbone – both of which carry hefty fines for non-compliance.
Meanwhile, Sweep’s dashboards have permitted the team to build bespoke visualizations of the emissions related to specific areas of business, such as procurement or logistics – and this on an almost real-time basis. This has made it possible to monitor the trajectory of emissions from different sources in light of any sustainability policy changes.
Having calculated its first carbon footprint for the year 2022 using Sweep, Crédit Agricole Nord Midi-Pyrénees is now looking to refine its emissions analysis on its 2023 calculations by examining supplier emissions more closely – something which it is now better placed to do, having significantly sped up and rationalized its data collection processes via Sweep’s questionnaires.
With the significant time and efficiency gains achieved by the Crédit Agricole Nord Midi-Pyrénées CSR team, Anne Mayor notes that she and her colleagues can now focus more on analyzing the collected data, tracking the progress of their sustainability initiatives, and collaborating with various sustainability data providers to jointly explore future emissions-reduction strategies.
“With Sweep, we finally have a platform that helps us to automate a number of our processes. For those which are not automated, the platform allows the owners of different sustainability data to have more autonomy in providing it to us, meaning we no longer rely on manual methods such as emails. We can see in real time who has answered a questionnaire, and track our data collection progress.”
