Italian lender Banco BPM has scooped the issuer impact reporting award after being praised for its focus on providing methodological transparency on its impact calculations to its sustainable bond investors.

Banco BPM has raised €4.25 billion ($4.6 billion) from sustainable bonds since 2021, of which €3.25 billion has been through green bonds to finance green property and renewable energy loans.

“Our report surpassed current market practices for the transparency on methodologies adopted for the calculation of impacts both for the green buildings and renewables portfolio,” Banco BPM sustainable funding team leader Daniela Antonini told Environmental Finance. “In particular we involved CRIF RES, a real estate expert in Italy and gave disclosure to investors on the methodology used to calculate avoided emissions on financed real estate assets.”

“The same has been done for renewable projects where almost 90% of data on energy production was retrieved from real data while for the remaining plants it was calculated by RINA, an expert on renewables,” Antonini added. “This allowed us to assess and communicate the full environmental impact of our green projects, from inception to completion.”

In the future, Banco BPM is looking to integrate EU Taxonomy-alignment data into its impact reports after including criteria in its updated framework just published in November 2023.

Nonetheless, Antonini said the market needs to make a “concerted effort” to improve impact reporting. For example, there needs to be greater impact metric standardisation across diverse projects and sectors.

“Another critical aspect is the quantification of life cycle impacts, which often proves challenging due to complex causal relationships and extended timeframes [of sustainable projects],” Antonini added.