ICICI Securities, a leading integrated technology-based securities firm, has released its ‘Environment Social Governance (ESG) Report 2021-22’. The editorial piece is sourced from the report, which featured the message of Vijay Chandok, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer, ICICI Securities Limited addressed to stakeholders.
Vijay Chandok has beautifully explained ESG priorities of the company.
I am extremely delighted to present to you our third Environment, Social & Governance (ESG) Report. We have an enduring heritage of being a responsible and sustainable business focusing on promoting the well-being of all our stakeholders. We remain committed to adopting the highest standards of Governance and Ethics in our business conduct, promoting inclusion and diversity amongst our employees, and ensuring the well-being of our customers, communities, and environment. Achieving overall long-term growth for us and our stakeholders is of prime importance to us.
Resilient Governance Structure
We are conscious of the responsibility and trust our stakeholders place in us. We continued to strengthen our Corporate Governance and Risk Management under the guidance of a highly qualified, diversified and independent Board. We ensured that we remained ethical in all our business dealings and have instituted various monitoring mechanisms to maintain high standards of ethical business behaviour. We have instituted an executive-level ESG forum to oversee the ESG journey of the company under the guidance of our Board. We continue to invest in further strengthening the emerging areas of cyber risk and information security.
A customer at the core
Our ‘Customer first’ philosophy drives us to constantly create innovative products and services keeping the interests of our customers in mind, personalize the customer experience to ensure delight in all customer engagements. Towards this objective, the Company focused the learning initiatives in FY2022 around three broad aspects of Customer First behavior, Design Thinking, and Creating synergies through Collaboration. We continued to ensure the digitization of our customer interaction platforms with a view to providing seamless access to services for all our customers. For spreading financial awareness amongst our customers and other stakeholders we organised two ESG seminars, launched the iLearn app, published newsletters and organised various interactions with market experts created curated content for social media handles and posted about 365 financial awareness videos on social media with a total 1.13 mn views.
Creating an impact for our communities
Making a difference in the lives of the less privileged, we humbly supported communities in the areas of sustainable livelihood, skill development, employment generation, women empowerment, education, and healthcare. Some of the key causes we supported during the year included project Hameri for women empowerment, setting up a model old age home in Leh, setting up high capacity oxygen plants at hospitals of Border Security Force and skill development initiatives through ICICI Foundation amongst others.
Nurturing our people
Our people are our greatest assets and a defining strength and ensuring their overall wellbeing and growth is of paramount importance for us. We have an inclusive, meritocratic, transparent, and equal opportunity culture. We ensure succession planning and career growth for all levels of employees. Throughout the pandemic, we supported our employees by enabling technology to work from home and facilitating health and vaccination-related assistance to ensure the wellbeing of the employees.
We remain committed to continuously investing in the growth & development of our workforce and alignment to our overall growth strategy and towards this end our average training hours per employee has gone up to 60 in FY22 from 41 in FY21 and we have 100% coverage for all employees in regulatory training.
Responsible Consumption
Our environmental footprint is relatively small, however in our endeavour to bring a positive change in the environment we have instituted steps for reducing consumption like reducing our GHG emissions, responsible recycling, and disposal of waste, and adopting eco-friendly paper. Our Scope 3 emissions in the current year were 85% lower than our FY19 baseline and we have increased our reduction target in paper consumption from an earlier 20% reduction by fiscal 2025 to a 35% reduction by fiscal 2025 over our FY2019 baseline.
ESG will continue to steer our growth
The year has further reinstated our belief that doing business sustainably is not only important but is our duty as responsible corporate citizens. We are committed to playing our part in this endeavour of creating a future we collectively look forward to and steering responsible and sustainable growth for us and all our stakeholders.
About the Author
Vijay Chandok, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, ICICI Securities Limited
Also Read: ICICI Securities releases ESG Report 2021-22 – India CSR
