Jean-Laurent Bonnafé: After a challenging year that saw most countries experience very strong recessions, the first signs of recovery are beginning to emerge in 2021. While the Chinese economy has already recovered, the Western economies are working to do so in particular thanks to the budgetary and monetary support measures that are being implemented. Despite the persistence of certain restrictions hampering the proper functioning of the economy, we can anticipate a gradual return to growth, against the backdrop of vaccination campaigns being ramped up. I am all-themore confident that companies, which have now adapted to the constraints of the health situation, are continuing their digital transformation at an accelerated pace. However, we will have to reckon with an inevitable rise in unemployment levels in the medium term, particularly among the youngest people who have been hit hard by the crisis and whom it is up to us to support.
Jean-Laurent Bonnafé: In the short term, 2021 is a year of transition towards the next BNP Paribas strategic plan, which we are in the process of putting together along with all our business lines. In this period, we continue to be fully committed to serving our customers, working with them to prepare for the economic recovery on a sustainable basis and remain at the forefront of banking innovation. Based on an organisation centred around our customers, the initial work related to our strategic plan for 2022-2025 focuses on a few priority areas: maximising synergies between all our retail business lines to accelerate the deployment of our digital offers; strengthening our development in the areas of savings, investment and protection; boosting the growth momentum of our corporate and institutional customers by leveraging strong customer franchises; and lastly, continuing to strengthen our industrial structure, with an organisation fully adapted to the new working methods. To best address these new human, technological and commercial challenges, we recently adjusted the scope of our operating divisions by creating a Retail Banking group, which brings together all our retail business lines, and an Investment & Protection Services group to achieve our savings and investment goals. At the same time, we also took the opportunity of changing the Group’s management team and, as such, continued to increase the number of women in our management bodies.
Looking ahead to the longer term, the crisis we are going through collectively invites us to build a more environment-friendly, more inclusive and more sustainable “future world”. We are already very active on sustainable finance issues and, by contributing significantly to the financing of our customers’ ecological transition, we are supporting the migration to a more responsible model. We intend to continue along this path and even accelerate: we are aligning our loan portfolio with the trajectory provided for by the Paris Climate Agreement, of a warming limited to two degrees, tending towards 1.5 degrees and, more recently in April 2021, we joined the “Net-Zero Banking Alliance” created by the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI). Convinced that protecting biodiversity is an absolute necessity, just like the climate, we are going to increase our financing commitments with a positive impact on biodiversity to 3 billion euros. More broadly, by the end of 2022, our financing in favour of the energy transition and directed towards sectors that contribute directly to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will amount to 210 billion euros.
