ABN AMRO puts suppliers on a sustainable footing

ABN AMRO’s biggest sustainability impact lies in helping its clients become more sustainable. Yet the bank can also make progress in sustainability by looking closely at its own business operations – and that includes sustainable procurement. ABN AMRO works in accordance with the internationally recognised ISO 20400 standard, which sets guidelines for sustainable procurement.

Questionnaires

“By ‘sustainable procurement’, we mean procurement that has the least negative and most positive impact on society and the environment,” says Chief Procurement Officer Marjolein Goense. “We use questionnaires and calculations to assess current and new suppliers against our sustainability criteria and policies.”

ABN AMRO works with some 2, 500 suppliers altogether. Each of them signs the bank’s Supplier Code of Conduct. Invitations to tender take three main aspects into consideration: impact on the climate, circularity and social impact. Further, it’s important that sustainability claims can be substantiated, which is why ABN AMRO also works with GSES (Global Sustainable Enterprise System), an organisation that evaluates suppliers in terms of their sustainability strategy and performance.

Assessing suppliers

“We’re not satisfied with just ticking off an item on a green checklist,” explains Christina Kruisdijk-Duhen, head of Category in the bank’s procurement department. “So if a supplier claims to operate on a sustainable basis, we ask them to deliver proof in the form of certification, for instance. We use the data in the GSES database to assess suppliers against one another in all our procurement categories.”

It’s clear that sustainability plays an increasingly important role in the bank’s procurement processes. In a recent facility management outsourcing project, for example, sustainability counted for 20 percent in the overall quality assessment. While that may sound like a lot, it’s not enough to make or break a decision – unless a supplier’s total score is the same as its competitors’, or if their sustainability score compares very unfavourably with the competition.

Marjolein says, “The bank wants to offer its clients the best possible products and services. Quality and reliability always come first. With a good supplier, sustainability and quality go hand in hand. Most of our partners already have high aspirations for sustainability, and they often share any number of key aims with the bank. In these cases, we make agreements together about what that means in practice in terms of their collaboration with ABN AMRO.”

Plane or train?

Business travel is a good example of how the bank’s sustainable procurement strategy works. ABN AMRO has agreements in place with sustainable hotels for overnight stays. The bank has also concluded a biofuel agreement with KLM, and offsets carbon emissions. “Obviously, we’d prefer not to generate those emissions in the first place,” Christina admits, “so for trips under 600 km, rail is the preferred means of transport.”

Based on their business model, some suppliers are by their very nature sustainable, like Emma at Work and Ctalents. These stakeholders support the bank in employing people with poor job prospects. Marjolein says, “By selecting social enterprises in our procurement processes, we can help them take the next step and fulfil their social mission.”

Sustainable procurement goes far beyond the sole aim of cutting carbon emissions. “Ensuring that individuals with poor employment prospects have access to the labour market is very much about human rights, for instance,” Marjolein explains. “We tend to think of human rights violations as occurring only in faraway places, but human rights also involve good employment practices, the equal treatment of men and women, and the right to join a trade union.”

In conversation

“While data play a major role in supplier assessment, the follow-up conversation is just as valuable, if not more so,” says Christina. “As important as they are, we can’t focus on hard data to the exclusion of all else. It’s only by discussing outcomes with suppliers that you really get to the heart of the matter. And those conversations are worth having.”

Marjolein concludes, “It’s fantastic that we can help continue to make supply chains more sustainable with our criteria, procurement decisions and discussions with suppliers. The result is that procurement, too, contributes to the bank’s purpose, ‘Banking for better, for generations to come’.”