ING publishes Human Rights report
16 November 2018
Did you know that about 40.3 million people were trapped in modern slavery in 2016? Or that hundreds of millions of people suffer from discrimination at work?
Sadly, human rights violations are still present in today’s world. This not only harms people, but has wider social and economic consequences. ING is committed to respecting human rights and critically reviewed our own practices, resulting in our first Human Rights report.
In the report, we take a look at five human rights issues. For ING as an employer, these are work-related stress and discrimination; as a corporate lender, these are land-related community issues, child labour and forced labour. Knowing the biggest risk to our people and the people in the supply chains that we finance, (known as ‘salient’ issues) means we can start managing them first.
ING measures how we are doing based on employee wellbeing, our interactions with clients, the environmental and social risk (ESR) cases we address, and potential controversies, for example. We’ve seen we can do better when it comes to tracking how frequently the salient issues come up and how we prioritise these issues. This is true for our own operations as well as those of our clients.
Doing this better will enhance our ability to assess whether our approach is successfully reducing the most severe impacts on people.
Taking action
We seek to embed human rights due diligence in to the fabric of our business. This will be a major challenge in the years ahead, but we have actions in place for continued improvement:
- We are updating our ESR sector policies.
- We plan to take action to extend opportunities for client engagement on human rights, including for the salient issues identified.
This report is a landmark for how we communicate about managing human rights. It allows us to share insights clearly and obtain feedback on how we can further improve. We aim to continue this transparency, with this first human rights report acting as a starting point for future disclosures on our performance.
ING’s human rights journey
| 2000: | Established an Environmental and Social Risk (ESR) team |
| 2003: | Became one of the first banks to adopt the Equator Principles |
| 2005: | Started a partnership programme with UNICEF |
| 2006: | Joined the UN Global Compact |
| Published ING’s Human Rights Statement for Employees for all of ING’s operations globally | |
| 2011: | Became a member of the Thun Group of Banks |
| 2012: | Introduced ING’s Procurement Sustainability Standards |
| 2013: | Advised the OECD on developing environmental and social risk due diligence in the financial sector |
| 2014: | Published ING’s Orange Code as an update to the previous ING Business Principles |
| 2015: | Took part in the Advisory Group of the OECD project on ‘Responsible Business Conduct in the Financial Sector’ |
| 2016: | Published ING’s Diversity Manifesto |
| Signed the Dutch Banking Sector Agreement on human rights | |
| Established a senior management Steering Committee to facilitate group-wide implementation of the DBA commitments | |
| 2017: | Updated ING’s Statement on Human Rights |
| Published ING’s entire loan portfolio per sector | |
| Defined salient human rights risks in our loan portfolio and own operations | |
| Adopted the Responsible Ship Recycling Standards for financing | |
| Published the UK Modern Slavery Act statement | |
| 2018: | Looked at human rights impacts in the gold, palm oil and cocoa Value Chains |
| Working to expand engagement efforts with corporate lending clients on human rights | |
| Updated ING’s group-wide complaints mechanism making clear reference to human rights and underlining its availability to all stakeholders | |
| Announced that ING will withdraw from the tobacco industry by 2023 | |
| Adopted non-financial risk assessments on potential human rights impacts | |
| Signed the UN Global Compact Women Empowerment Principles | |
| Supported the UN standards for tackling LGBT+ discrimination in the workplace | |
| Published a first human rights report in line with the UNGP Reporting Framework | |
| Working towards an updated ESR Framework, including an expanded overarching human rights policy |