In 2023, Scotiabank’s signature corporate responsibility programme, ScotiaRise, began to hit its stride. This is a 10-year initiative launched in 2021, and it is already having a demonstrable impact in the communities where the $500 million planned investment is being deployed.
The aim of ScotiaRise is to strengthen economic resilience among disadvantaged people and groups. Last year, the bank supported more than 200 community partners, with $42.2 million in global community investments, up 24% from the previous year.
Total investment to date is now $102 million, but Meigan Terry, who has been leading the bank’s environmental, social and governance strategy since she joined in 2018, is wary of providing these dollar amounts without context.
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“What we have done with our ScotiaRise programme is to move away from talking about just the dollars we invest to reporting on the positive social outcomes we create,” she says. “We can all write cheques, but the hard part is how do you hold yourselves accountable and demonstrate to your shareholders and employees that the community investments you are making are actually delivering the societal returns you are counting on them to create.”
Instead, Terry prefers to measure the success of ScotiaRise by the number of individual cases of community support, which she says comprised 858,323 individual actions in 2023, helping with basic needs and supporting costs, educational interventions, new employment contracts and newcomer support.
Meanwhile, the programme has refined its approach to making investments in indigenous communities to better support them under the plan’s education, employment and basic needs areas. The bank is committed to spending at least 6% of its budget on indigenous organizations and activities.
And it is not just improving external outreach. In 2023, the bank aligned its benefits to these ScotiaRise ambitions and expanded its medical coverage to indigenous wellbeing expenses, including cultural learning such as language courses, traditional medicine and indigenous-developed and indigenous-led cognitive behavioural therapies.
These efforts also dovetail with Scotiabank’s truth-and-reconciliation team that has been established with a mandate to oversee the implementation, sustainment and evolution of reconciliation initiatives across the bank in Canada.
In May 2023, it formalized its commitment to this process by embarking on the development of a truth and reconciliation plan, which is expected to be completed shortly. It will formally outline the commitments and steps that the bank will take to achieve reconciliation and to establish relationships of trust between it and indigenous employees, clients and communities.
Scott Thomson, who has been chief executive of Scotiabank since January 2023, says that the bank intends to build upon these initiatives to forge new levels of trust in Canada and beyond.
“Our vision is to be the most trusted financial institution globally,” he says. “That’s a north-star ambition. It’s very aspirational, but if we can get there over a 10-year period, then I think we will have made a difference.”
ScotiaRise also covers outreach to refugees.
What we have done with our ScotiaRise programme is to move away from talking about just the dollars we invest to reporting on the positive social outcomes we create
Meigan Terry
In 2023, the bank renewed its partnership with TalentLift Canada, which helps refugees find work and relocation opportunities. The bank has invested almost $950,000 to help scale the organization’s talent platform, which connects skilled refugees with Canadian employers.
ScotiaRise also renewed a $600,000 community partnership with the Rick Hansen Foundation School, which provides teachers with the resources to improve accessibility and disability inclusion in schools and communities throughout the country. The programme also has an active sporting element, with $2.9 million invested in 2023 to help make ice hockey more accessible – with more than 200,000 young people benefiting.
Outside Canada, the bank has developed a similar approach using football to build more inclusive sporting participation in the countries where the bank operates.
Terry is also keen to stress the importance of its climate strategy within the lens of corporate responsibility: all community outreach is reinforced by efforts to protect the environment and fight degradation of the local ecology. To this end, in 2023 Scotiabank increased its global target to reduce operational Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions from 35% to 40% by 2023.
The bank also committed to be carbon-neutral in its Canadian operations by 2025 and globally by 2030; some 83% of its Canadian electricity needs are now from emissions-free sources.
But, Terry says, she still bumps up against issues with the bank’s net-zero strategy.
“Our biggest challenge around anything to do with climate is data,” she says. “When we look at our net-zero goals, we have set financed emissions targets on power and utilities, on oil and gas, and just recently on auto. But two of our highest-emitting sectors for financed emissions – residential mortgages and agriculture – we can’t set targets on right now.
“We have excellent programmes and research to help reduce emissions in those categories in the meantime, but getting quality data is really hard.”
