Awards for Excellence 2017
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It is hard to find a more thoughtful bank in central and eastern Europe than Poland’s Bank Millennium, which is why this year it wins the award for best bank for corporate social responsibility (CSR). The bank provides full transparency around its objectives and actions to bring socially responsible banking to clients, employees, investors and society. For clients, two of the chief aims have been to focus on disabilities and financial exclusion.
Last year, Bank Millennium’s foundation launched a financial education programme for pre-school children that reached 6,000 students. The foundation also runs programmes that have served more than 50,000 middle-school and high-school students throughout Poland, ensuring that young people will be fully versed in how to be part of the financial system.
The bank has also adapted its website to meet the needs of the disabled, elderly and those at risk of digital exclusion, such as having high-contrast definition, keyboard functionality and easy-to-understand content.
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For its employees, Bank Millennium operates full transparency around pay and diversity. For example, it discloses on its website the number of discrimination complaints it receives (none in 2016), pay disparity between men and women at every level, and the number of employees that describe themselves as having a disability. The bank is a strong advocate for parents’ rights and offers family outings and contests for employees’ children.
Committed to society, the bank is active in Poland in job creation, hosting internships and training schemes, as well as innovation camps where developers can tap into the bank’s IT expertise in the form of a mentorship workshop. The bank also sponsors several arts and cultural events across the region.
On the environmental side, the bank runs educational programmes for employees on waste reduction and offers environment-supporting products to clients such as a World Wildlife Fund credit card, with part of the revenue generated transferred to WWF Foundation Polska, and Leasing Eko Energia, which supports investments in energy-saving machinery and equipment.
