All banks today claim to have inclusion, diversity, accessibility and sustainability programmes, but some stand out for the breadth of their initiatives. Under chief executive Bharat Masrani, Canada’s TD Bank Group is one that has made corporate responsibility a priority for years in its approach to customers, clients and employees.
In 2022, the bank reframed its economic inclusion efforts in its TD Pathways to Economic Inclusion initiative, which groups its activity into three areas: access to employment, finance and housing.
In the employment access area, the bank has worked to promote social mobility through a certification programme for refugee-owned businesses, which the bank launched alongside the Canadian Aboriginal and Minority Supplier Council.
In financial access, the bank has been supporting the Black Opportunity Fund’s support for entrepreneurs through microloans to those unable to get bank finance. And in housing, the bank launched its Home Access Mortgage product, which aims to boost home ownership among Black and Hispanic communities.
TD has been actively engaged with diversity and inclusion efforts since 2005 and its enterprise inclusion and diversity leadership council monitors its progress across a raft of inclusion initiatives that span areas including disability, ethnicity and sexuality.
In the past year, the bank reached its commitment to double Black representation among executives at vice-president level and above compared with July 2020. It also looks on target to reach its objective of 25% Black, Indigenous and minority representation by 2025, as well as 45% of Canadian vice-president-plus roles to be held by women. Some 44% of the bank’s board of directors are women.
Accessibility to customers with specific needs has also been a focus for TD, as have efforts to encourage diversity throughout the bank’s supply chain. It has introduced a video phone line for customers who use sign language to enable them to have access to remote banking.
Supporting local communities is another of the bank’s objectives. It is already more than halfway through a 2030 $1 billion community-giving programme that it set in 2019. This TD Ready Commitment helped more than 3,000 organizations in 2022.
TD has made tackling the environmental impact of its own operations a priority
TD has made tackling the environmental impact of its own operations a priority: in 2010, it was the first bank in North America to be carbon neutral. It followed that up in 2020 by being the first of the big Canadian banks to set a net-zero greenhouse gas emission target for its operations and financing activities by 2050, before adding a target to reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 25% by 2025 compared with 2019 levels – a target that it was just a few basis points from reaching by the end of 2022.
The bank has a new sustainable and decarbonization finance target (SDFT) of $500 billion by 2030, covering areas such as lending, underwriting and advisory, as well as the bank’s own investments. It also has an emphasis on economic inclusion in the areas of employment and housing.
The more ambitious SDFT follows the bank’s earlier 2030 low-carbon financing target of $100 billion that it announced in 2017 but reached well ahead of plan in 2022. At the same time, the bank has expanded its Scope 3 disclosure to include shipping, aviation, industrials and automotive, on top of the existing disclosure for energy, power and utilities.
