Review of materiality matrix

Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich AG (RZB), one of the biggest banks in Austria and CEE, requested a check of its materiality matrix. Hauska & Partner assessed the material issues and fields of action, and contrasted them with requirements from international standards and guidelines, e.g. the Global Reporting Initiative, the EU directive on non-financial reporting or the Sustainable Development Goals.

Based on the assessment, Hauska & Partner implemented a tool that enables the depiction of the relations between issues, their variations (e.g. values, strategies, tools), hierarchies, and to cluster them. As the topics were not unattached, but embedded in their connections, this issues map provides an overview about all topics and their context and made it easier to prioritize.

Result

RZB gained a new insight in their material issues. The visual connections between the topics and fields of interest in the issues map allow new strategic inputs. They also build a valuable basis for stakeholder discussions, as the bank’s stakeholder dialogue showed in 2015.