Letter From The Chairman Of The Bank’s Management Board

Corporate Social and environmental responsibility has been embedded in the Bank’s business strategy for years. Our goal is to eradicate digital and physical barriers to accessing financial and non-financial services. In addition to introducing facilities for people with disabilities to access branches, ATMs, our website and designing our service process accordingly, we also increase access to mobile solutions. This way, clients are able to use, at any time and place, not only banking but also non-banking services, such as: e-administration, purchase of urban transport tickets, payment of parking fees or highway tolls.

Bank Millennium expands the idea of a barrier-free world also to other areas of its activity, including cultural patronage initiatives. By providing audio description for movies during Millennium Docs Against Gravity, the largest Polish festival of documentary films, it facilitated access of vision impaired people to culture. In 2019, Bank Millennium was ranked first in the “Accessibility” category in the Ranking of Banks published by Miesięcznik Finansowy Bank, which confirms that our efforts to increase accessibility have been recognized.

We are implementing our civic mission also by sharing our competence in finance in order to solve key social problems. One of them is the low level of general financial knowledge in the Polish society. We believe that financial education should begin at the earliest age, because that is when behaviors and attitudes develop. This is why we have initiated an educational project targeting pre-school children under the name of “Financial ABCs”. The objective of this program executed through the Bank Millennium Foundation under the honorary patronage of the Minister of Education and the Commissioner for Children’s Rights is to explain basic financial concepts to these young children through fun and games. So far six editions of the program have been organized. Overall, nearly 53,000 children from approximately 630 preschools across Poland have received instruction during nearly 2,200 workshops. In 2019, the “Financial ABCs” received the first prize in the “Golden Banker” competition in the “Socially Sensitive Bank” category.

With the support of the Bank Millennium Foundation, the Bank’s employees are also able to implement their own social activism ideas. So far, more than 500 volunteers took part in the initiatives financed with the grants awarded by the Foundation. They carried out programs that they themselves defined, for nearly 14,000 beneficiaries. Volunteers renovated school rooms and a playground next to an orphanage, renovated a common room in the children’s hospital, prepared a play area in an animal shelter or even built a school sports pitch.

[GRI 102-12] As a signatory of two important international initiatives, we are working towards the promotion of diversity and contribute to the execution of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). By signing the Diversity Charter, we accepted an obligation to eliminate discrimination from the workplace and to act towards the creation and promotion of diversity. When joining the partnership between business and the government administration to achieve these UN Sustainable Development Goals, we declared that it would conduct activities in particular for the financial education of children and youth.

We are not indifferent to the important issue of climate change. We have always taken it into account in our operations, even though the Bank’s exposure to financing high-carbon sectors, such as coal mines and coal-based power sector, was historically low compared to the banking sector average. In 2019, we formalized our approach to the climate protection issue by developing the “Bank Millennium Group Environmental Policy”, in which we defined the direction for our activities aimed at the mitigation of negative changes occurring in the natural environment.

In our business activities, we focus on creating common value: for the company and for its environment. Objective external reviews prove that sustainable development practices have become an integral element of our activity. In 2019, Bank Millennium was included in the WIG-ESG index of the Warsaw Stock Exchange. In 2010-2019 it was part of the Respect Index. In the Ranking of Socially Responsible Companies published by the Responsible Business Forum, we are in the top ten that espouse CSR to the greatest extent. Also, every year we are awarded the Silver CSR Leaf in the Polityka weekly’s ranking.

Please read our non-financial report, which contains a detailed description of our approach and activities that allow us to run a sustainable business.

Joao Bras Jorge

Chairman of the Management Board of Bank Millennium