Company: BCDRF
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0000891478-25-000054
Chunk: 172

Company: Banco Santander, S.A.
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form: 20-F
Chunk 172
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 Responsible Banking, Risk; Cybersecurity; Compliance and conduct; Financial Crime and compliance; Human resources.

→ Relevant policies related to sustainability: Responsible banking and sustainability; Code of conduct; Code of conduct in securities markets; Corporate Defence; Environmental, social and climate change risk; Tax; Conflict of interest; Defence sector; Anti-money laundering and countering the financing terrorism; Remuneration; Performance management; Group Succession; Culture.

For more details on the Group's key regulatory documents on sustainability, see our corporate website santander.com.

SN 3. Materiality assessment – Detailed methodology

The Group and subsidiaries’ double materiality assessments are based on European Sustainability Regulatory Standards (ESRS) 1 and 2, and the Double Materiality Assessment Guide from the ERAG.

Our assessment comprised these phases:

1. Background and stakeholder analysis

General view of the bank, its operations and main lines of business, based on:

→ Information on the entity : Sources include strategic and financial plans, financial statements and other published reports. This analysis considers operations, products and services, geographical footprint, business relationships and the value chain.

→ External information : Public documents on sector trends, analyst and supervisor papers, and peers’ sustainability reports.

To enhance this background analysis, we also use these external sources :

1. The UNEP FI impact analysis tool to uncover the impact of the Group’s financing operations, including those related to climate change. This tool provides a in-built impact mappings that combined, with our internal data and context, enables us to identify the most significant impact areas of the portfolio.

2. The ENCORE (environmental risk assessment) database to obtain information on the bank customer’s environmental dependencies.

ENCORE: a materiality database of dependencies between production processes and ecosystem services.

3. Human rights due diligence to spot the actual and potential impact of the bank’s operations on human rights throughout the value chain.

We use the stakeholder analysis to identify directly affected stakeholders (customers, employees and investors) and readers of the report (supervisors and regulators, our communities and NGOs). We analyse information gathered during stakeholder engagement exercises and conduct surveys on sustainability matters to use as part of our materiality assessment.

2. Identification of impacts, risks and opportunities

The background analysis uncovered +100 IROs. We categorize every IRO and assign them to a topic, sub-topic or sub-sub-topic under ESRS 1, AR 16. For each IRO, we detail:

→ the part of the value chain they touch and over