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SEB included in EU’s Platform on Sustainable Finance

SEB’s head of sustainability strategy and policy, Karl-Oskar Olming, has been selected as a member of the European Commission’s new expert group that will continue the work on developing the EU’s sustainability strategy. SEB is the only Nordic bank to be included in this group.

“It is exciting to have this opportunity to contribute to the creation of a comprehensible and transparent system for driving capital in a sustainable direction,” comments Karl-Oskar Olming.

During the year the European Commission established a taxonomy that defines the threshold values that a business must stay within to be in compliance with the Paris Agreement’s goal to slow global warming. SEB’s Marie Baumgarts was a member of the Technical Expert Group that worked on the taxonomy.

This work is now continuing in a new expert group known as the Platform on Sustainable Finance.

“We are now proceeding with a broader effort to create a taxonomy also for areas such as protection of biodiversity, the transition to a circular economy, protection of water and marine resources, and pollution prevention,” says Olming.

The work is planned to conducted over a two-year period. There are also plans, over time, to create a social taxonomy and a “brown taxonomy”. The latter includes threshold levels for businesses with a strongly negative environmental impact.

The expert group includes some 50 members who represent industry and stakeholder organisations, authorities, the academic and research community, and a number of large companies. The financial sector is represented by three banks: SEB, Allianz and BNP Paribas.

“As a member of this panel we will gain important knowledge and insight about the process and will establish many contacts with other banks and bank associations in Europe,” Olming says.

Read more on the European Commission website