ESG Development in Mexican Financials

Marimar Torreblanca
2 min readDec 24, 2020

November 5th, 2020

This week, we are sharing our ESG Development Heatmap for the last sector we were missing in the Mexican market: Financials (split into Banks and Non-Bank Financials). As in the past, we only focused on (1) companies listed in the Mexican Stock Exchange and (2) publicly disclosed materials.

Banks

Non-Bank Financials

What can we read from this heatmap?

  1. 62.5% of banks and 33.3% of non-bank financials have done a materiality analysis.
  2. Four banks disclose some KPIs for some of their material topics, but no company in either group discloses KPIs for all material topics together with goals for these KPIs.
  3. 62.5% of banks and 50% of non-bank financials have a dedicated team or committee for ESG.
  4. 75% of banks and 50% of non-bank financials are aligned with UN’s SDGs.
  5. 62.5% of banks and 50% of non-bank financials are signatories of the UN Global Compact.
  6. Only 1 bank is aligned with both TCFD and Science Based Targets, while no non-bank financials are.
  7. 3 banks (37.5%) are aligned with CDP, and no non-bank financials are.
  8. 75% of banks and 66% of non-bank financials published an integrated or sustainability report in 2019.
  9. 60% of these reports had external verification.
  10. 80% of these reports were done under GRI’s methodology.
  11. No company reports SASB’s indicators.

The Financials sector seems to be one of the early adopters of ESG in Mexico, at least as far as ESG communication goes. Banks, in particular, seem to be ahead of the curve with one of the most active companies in terms of ESG in Mexico (Banorte) leading by example. Non-bank Financials still have a lot to do in terms of going through a formal process of materiality and KPIs definition. We would also expect the adoption of SASB indicators to start permeating into this sector as soon as in the next reporting season given the push from investors for this.

I hope you found this interesting. As usual, if there is anything we can help you with, please reach out.

Best,

Marimar

Partner, Miranda ESG

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Marimar Torreblanca

Miranda ESG Co-founder. Spent 15 years in Equity Research at UBS. Known for publishing in-depth reports on corporate governance issues in the FIBRAs sector.