Dear Stakeholders,
Responding to increasing demand for consumption despite decreasing natural resources has become one of the greatest challenges of our times. While trying to meet the demands without destroying the natural life and endangering the biodiversity, we also had to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. We continued to stand by our stakeholders in this difficult struggle given by our country and the world against the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this difficult time when we reinforced our understanding of corporate governance, we took another new step and published our first Integrated Annual Report. We prepared our report and both our financial and non-financial performance in compliance with the Integrated Reporting Framework (<IR Framework>) of the Value Reporting Foundation (VRF). Furthermore, our sustainability contents were consolidated at the Core level specified in the GRI Standards published by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and we will continue reporting them annually. During the preparation process of our report, we created our understanding of integrated value creation by holding a series of meetings that brought together various relevant internal departments. In Halkbank’s Value Creation Model section, you can examine in detail the value we created in the 6 capitals we determined as a result of our business operations.
Parallel with our mission, we continue our efforts to make all our stakeholders sustainable as required by our operations. In doing this, we design not only today but also the future and develop our plans for the short, medium and long term. In assessing the risks and opportunities during this process, we take into consideration external factors and act in accordance with our understanding of agile management. In addition to particularly the COVID-19 pandemic that impacted 2020, we are also closely monitoring developments regarding Value Creation for the Local Economy, Climate Change, Digitalization and Cyber Security, which we foresee will stand out in the short term.
To identify the 2020 Sustainability Priorities of our Bank, we held a workshop led by the Coordination Group which the representatives from Departments which were in direct contact with critical stakeholders participated in. We subsequently made a survey with the members of the Sustainability Committee representing the perspective of Halkbank’s Executive Management. As a result, we observed an increase in the significance of the topics “Value Creation with SME Banking”, “Integration of Corporate Strategy and Sustainability Strategy”, “Risk and Crisis Management”, “Information Security” and “Digital Transformation” in particular. Please refer to Halkbank’s Prioritized Sustainability Topics to examine the distribution of our prioritized topics that coincide with our 2020 Focus Topics.
We reflect our target of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals prepared by the United Nations to both our internal and external activities. We will continue our investments with our projects and policies for the development of both our customers and Turkey.
Best regards,
Himmet KARADAĞ
