Materiality assessment

Our sustainability reporting activities focus on topics that are relevant to our business and our stakeholders. We regularly undertake a materiality assessment in order to identify economic, environmental and social issues that may either have a significant impact on the company’s business performance or substantively influence the assessments and decisions of our stakeholders. We believe that this helps us recognize new trends and evolve our strategy over time as well as align our reporting with the interests and needs of our business and our stakeholders.

The materiality assessment is based on our ongoing dialogue with stakeholders across all parts of our organization. Our materiality assessment process is consolidated in a way that both past material issues that remain relevant as well as important new topics can be addressed.

The 2021 update of the list of material issues was structured as a qualitative stocktaking process of selected experts’ views, including an analysis of monitoring tools and a dedicated media review. Throughout this process, we considered the perspective of clients, investors and analysts, policymakers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), employees and other stakeholders. The resulting 2021 list of material issues reflects average values of perceived importance by these different stakeholders.

The greatest increase in relative importance compared to the previous year was attributed to the issues of Responsible Investments and Transparency & alignment to ESG frameworks.