Corporate responsibility
In all our activities we carefully weigh the interests of our stakeholders: clients, shareholders, employees, regulators, capital providers, business partners and society at large. We pride ourselves on a longstanding culture of accountability, integrity and ethical business practice.
In pursuing sustainable growth and managing for value, we aim to consistently exceed our clients’ expectations without compromising our business principles. We comply with ING Group's business principles, which define the standards of behaviour required by all ING employees as well as our commitments towards key stakeholders.
Responsible business practice
Our clients
We are committed to building long-term relationships with our clients around the world by providing outstanding service. Strengthening client relationships is one of our strategic objectives. Client trust is driven by many factors and among other things depends on how easy we are to deal with, how responsive we are to clients’ needs, whether we fulfil our promises and whether we treat our clients fairly.
Sustainability
In 2008 a sustainability policy was formalised, which defines our vision, ambition, themes and principles and is aligned with ING Group’s Corporate Social Responsibility Policy. The policy serves as a sustainability framework for our business.
We have adopted the ‘People, Planet and Profit’ principle to identify the key role of real estate in relation to sustainability. We believe that this captures the inextricable relationship between economic performance (profit), environmental protection (planet) and social consciousness (people). We are therefore committed to balancing and aligning all three aspects when practicing sustainability.
We have adopted the following sustainability principles:
- We believe sustainable real estate will deliver above average returns
- We gather proof and collect evidence of the value of sustainable real estate
- We aim for thought leadership on sustainability
- We promote categorising real estate-based sustainability aspects
- We are open and clear on our sustainability achievements
- We incorporate sustainability in our core processes
Investing
We are committed to integrating sustainable property investment (SPI) practices (SPI) into our day-to-day business operations. In addition to the mitigation of our own environmental footprint, we recognise the need to invest in properties that reduce the adverse effects on the environment. As we are a global business with operations across four continents, we have clients with sustainability requirements that are as diverse as the local markets in which we operate. Ultimately the guiding principle for our SPI policy is to actively engage our clients and other stakeholders in pursuing sustainability to a greater degree.
Charitable activities
We support the Chances for Children programme run by ING Group together with UNICEF, which is designed to provide children in Brazil, Ethiopia and India with access to primary education.
