RT Journal Article
T1 Evaluation of non-financial information and its contribution to advancing the sustainable development goals within the Spanish banking sector
A1 Aguado Correa, Francisco
A1 Vega Jiménez, Juan José de la
A1 López Jiménez, José María
A1 Padilla Garrido, Nuria
A1 Rabadán Martín, Inmaculada
AB Non-financial information and its contribution to the achievement of each Sustainable Development Goal(SDG) are assuming great relevance in the business world, in which it is not enough to be economically sustainablewithout also being sustainable from ethical, environmental, and social points of view. An analysis ofhow the financial sector contributes to the achievement of the SDGs is crucial in two ways. Firstly, due to therelevance and the magnitude of this sector itself; secondly, and more importantly in our view, because of thefinancial leverage of the banking sector that has a mandate to facilitate the transition of all economic sectorstowards sustainability, guided by the 2030 Agenda. However, despite the expectations placed on bankingentities, there is a research gap on their disclosure practices and on the SDG-related information that theyreport. In addition, the academic literature centered on the analysis of SDG-related disclosures through artificialintelligence is very scarce. To fill this gap, the objective of our study is, on the one hand, to analyzewhether there is greater homogeneity in the disclosure of non-financial information in the Spanish bankingsector following the transposition of Directive 2014/95/EU into Spanish Law. On the other hand, it is to evaluatethe contribution of banking entities to the SDGs. To do so, the non-financial information reports of 12Spanish banks are analyzed, completing a comparative evaluation and using artificial intelligence to identifymentions of each SDG and its targets. The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution(TOPSIS) was also used to rank the banking entities in accordance with their contribution to each SDG. Theresults reflected the plurality, in both breadth and quality, in the disclosure of non-financial information andin the contribution to the SDGs. The only point in common between all the entities that were studied wasthe use of the GRI disclosure framework and the identification of the priority SDGs, positioning SDGs 8, 13,and 4 in priority positions. The banks with higher bank capitalization levels occupied the top of the rankingof contributions to the SDGs. Differences were presented for all other aspects, even to the point of highlightingthat some entities or independent verifiers had not offered all the information. In conclusion, greaterefforts to improve the quality of non-financial reporting and further development of the common regulatoryframework will be fundamental for better comparability between the reports from banking entities. Furthermore,this study shows that natural language processing can be applied to better measure companies’ alignmentwith the SDGs based on the text of their non-financial reports
PB Elsevier
SN 2444-8834
SN 2444-8842 (electrónico)
YR 2023
FD 2023
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10272/22213
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10272/22213
LA eng
NO Aguado-Correa, F., de la Vega-Jiménez, J. J., López-Jiménez, J. M., Padilla-Garrido, N., & Rabadán-Martín, I. (2023). Evaluation of non-financial information and its contribution to advancing the sustainable development goals within the Spanish banking sector. In European Research on Management and Business Economics (Vol. 29, Issue 1, p. 100211). Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iedeen.2022.100211
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 13 jul 2026