OREANDA-NEWS. October 06, 2014. Bloomberg Markets magazine has published the 2014 TOP 20 of world's greenest banks, naming SEB group as 9th environment-friendly bank in the world.
 
The list is topped by three European banks. The first place in Bloomberg's TOP 20 is won by the Spanish based Banco Santander, with the French bank BNP Paribas being in the second place and Italian bank Unicredit as third.

Eight European banks have made the TOP 20 list of greenest banks. Seven of the TOP 20 greenest banks are from North America, two are from Asia and one bank from Latin America, Australia and Africa.

From European banks also the UK based HSBC Holdings (7th place), Swiss Credit Suisse Group (10th place), German Deutsche Bank (12th place) as well as Italian Intesa Sanpaolo (14th place) have secured a spot in Bloomberg's TOP 20 of world's greenest banks.

To rank banks' environmental records, Bloomberg Markets compared their investments in clean energy (wind, solar, geothermal, hydro energy and biofuel technologies) and efforts to reduce their own waste and carbon footprints. Only banks that were members of prominent national stock indexes and that had market values of at least \\$10 billion have been considered.

The list of greenest financial institutions has been prepared as the United Nations Climate summit takes place in New York as well as UN General-Secretary Ban Ki-moon's appeal to business leaders to shift from fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions