Stakeholder engagement

We identify our stakeholders by conducting regular dialogue across a number of business and functional areas on an annual basis, which includes consideration of 'silent' stakeholders such as future generations and the environment. A global stakeholder database is used for managing information and communicating to our stakeholders. It includes around 5,400 individual stakeholders who we have identified as important to our business, including governments, regulators, customer and community groups, suppliers, investors and employees.

Stakeholder engagement is embedded into our business strategy and decision making processes. We seek to understand the expectations of our stakeholders by learning about them, understanding their motivations, engaging with our toughest critics and developing shared goals where appropriate. This helps us to balance the competing needs of stakeholders, respond to concerns and manage issues in an informed and effective manner.

Our approaches to stakeholder engagement include:

• dialogue in the form of stakeholder forums, participation in multi-stakeholder initiatives and meetings
• consultation through surveys, focus groups and online feedback forms
• communication through our CR newsletter and website
  partnerships with community organisations
• employee engagement through our annual survey, 'My Voice' and through our on-line 'CEO Chat' feedback forum

We hold forums for specific stakeholder groups each year to seek formal input into our business agenda. These forums are attended by a consistent group of stakeholders, along with new participants, ensuring progress and tracking of issues that have been raised in past forums, together with the identification of new and emerging issues. Ongoing engagement on key strategic and operational decisions is prioritised by involving our stakeholders in internal working groups, focus groups, seminars and surveys.

Our principles of non-financial reporting promote open, transparent and timely disclosure to stakeholders of the material economic, social and environmental issues facing our business. Each year, we conduct extensive engagement with internal and external stakeholders to understand the material issues that are important to our business. This process then informs the development of our specific and public group-wide CR targets, which are reported on an interim and annual basis.

Communicating with shareholders and financial markets

As a significant financial services provider in many markets we recognise the importance of communicating frequently and effectively with our shareholders, the broader investment community and other stakeholder groups who seek to understand our financial and non-financial performance.

Our approach aims to ensure these groups have timely access to information through a variety of channels. As well as communicating ad hoc announcements that are material to our market performance, we schedule regular trading updates and publicly announce and explain half- and full-year results. In addition, our executives have regular contact with the investment community using a variety of forums across our region.

We participate and support a number of external initiatives including:

• ASrIA (joined 2011)
• Business for Social Responsibility
• Carbon Disclosure Project
• Clean Energy Council
• Equator Principles (joined 2006) and Equator Principles Working Group
• Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the GRI Australian Focal Point Working Group
• London Benchmarking Group (Australia and UK)
• Low Carbon Australia
• OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises
• Principles for Social Investment
• Singapore Compact for CSR
• Transparency International
• Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)
• World Business Council for Sustainable Development
• UN Environment Program Finance Initiative
• UN Global Compact and UN Global Compact Australian Network (joined 2010)

2012 results

We are committed to responding to issues of relevance to our stakeholders. For a full list of 2012 issues and our response please see our 2012 Stakeholder Engagement Table (PDF 696kB).

We consider ongoing open dialogue and relationships of trust, integrity and respect as the markers of successful stakeholder engagement.

We have a formalised stakeholder engagement policy that applies to all employees and aims to maintain structured engagement with stakeholders through consistent communication channels; clear ownership of relationships and clear accountabilities for relationship owners. The policy has been updated to ensure the framework is robust and relevant.

External engagement takes many forms, involves many people and organisations and benefits the bank and stakeholders in a number of important ways. Our main activities for 2012 included:

Government

• Closely engaged with the Australian Government on developments in the global economy and the impact on the Australian economy and banking sector.
• Prepared submissions to, and appeared before, Federal parliamentary committee inquiries into privacy reforms, financial advice legislation and banking competition.
• Provided submissions to the Joint Australian and New Zealand Productivity Commissions' Study into strengthening economic relations between Australia and New Zealand and to the Taskforce developing the White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century.

Shareholders

• Held an ‘Asian Investor Tour’ and Global Wealth & Private Banking presentation to update investors about the progress of our Super Regional Strategy and Wealth Business respectively.
• Engaged proactively and regularly with analysts, industry funds and fund managers on ANZ's strategy, performance and emerging issues with ANZ recognized at the 2012 Australia Investor Relations Association Awards.
• Managed communication with retail shareholders through information meetings, the Shareholder Review and Annual General Meeting and liaison with the Australia Shareholders Association.
  Further engagement conducted over the previous year is communicated on our Investor Centre.

Our communities and customers

• Released our latest Indigenous Action Plan (IAP) in June 2012. The IAP continues our commitment to provide employment and training opportunities for Indigenous Australians.
• Continued supporting rural and regional communities in Australia through our Seeds of Renewal program, in which we partner with the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal to provide small grants of up to AU$10,000 to community organisations in remote areas. This year, we supported 35 new projects across regional Australia.
• Engaged with local governments and community organisations in our region to inform our response to natural disasters such as the Fiji floods in January 2012.
• Engaged with key stakeholders in countries across the Asia-Pacific region to extend our flagship financial education and capability programs using a partnership model.
• Communicated regularly with over 6,000 of our stakeholders including customers, community members, non-government and community organisations through our stakeholder database.

Employees

• Completed the annual group wide ‘My Voice’ survey with over 40,000 participating employees.
• Assisted Fiji employees to set up a staff collective association to enable employees to regularly engage with senior business representatives on organisational changes. Enterprise Agreement discussions and other activities were typically performed by the Fiji union prior to enactment of the ENI Decree.
• Introduced assistance measures, including the extension of our $10 million New Career Training Fund and Past Employee Care Fund to support people directly impacted by organisational restructuring.
• Developed new Enterprise Agreements in Australia, New Zealand and other Pacific countries to provide certainty for ANZ and our staff regarding pay and conditions for the next two to three years.

Suppliers

• Developed strategies to manage social and environmental risks in our supply chain, eg Supplier Forums in Asia and staff workshops in Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
• Increased the scale of our Supplier Code of Practice auditing to identify and remediate reputational risk.

2011 results

In 2011, in addition to maintaining strong relations with governments and investors and shareholders our engagement program has helped us to:

• Publish a revised approach to lending in sensitive sectors such as energy and military equipment
• Complete a review of our investment portfolios against the guidelines set out in the UN Principles for Responsible Investment
• Introduce a comprehensive Supplier Code of Practice to improve the identification and management of social (including human rights) and environment related risk in our supply chain

We use the input of stakeholders to strengthen decision making and identify ways to improve products and processes. Key activities in 2011 included:

Government

• Closely engaged with the Government on the state of the economy and competition in the banking sector.
• Prepared submissions for Federal parliament inquiries into credit reforms, small business lending and banking competition.
• Provided input into the Australia – Japan and Republic of Korea free trade agreement discussions and the negotiations towards an Indonesia – Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA).

Shareholders

• Held a ‘Strategy Update’ to inform investors about the next phase of ANZ’s transformation.
• Engaged proactively with analysts, industry funds and fund managers on emerging issues of environmental, social and governance risk management.
• Continued to provide key stakeholders such as Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) and the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors with updates on our position on coal and management of Greenpeace’s public campaign relating to the coal industry.
• Further engagement conducted over the previous year is communicated on our Investor Centre.

Our communities

• Engaged with NGOs and other stakeholders across our region to help assess and improve our assistance for customers facing financial difficulty; improve service accessibility for people with disability; and develop our skilled volunteering program.
• Engaged with local governments and community organisations in our region to inform our response to natural disasters including the Japan earthquake and tsunami, the Queensland floods and the Christchurch earthquake.
• Engaged with community-based groups, industry organisations, governments and with Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) such as Oxfam, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund Australia, The Wilderness Society, The Uniting Church Australia, Clean Energy Council, the Australian Conservation Foundation and other external stakeholders in Australia and the region to better understand their views on social and environmental issues in our lending portfolio.
• Reviewed our sensitive sector policies – Water, Forestry and Forests, Energy, and Extractive Industries – to ensure our approach to responsible lending in complex industries remains consistent with our values, our CR framework, international and industry standards, and evolving stakeholder expectations.
• Revised our Military Equipment Policy in response to stakeholder concerns regarding clients associated with the production of cluster munitions or cluster munitions componentry.
• Engaged with NGOs and other stakeholders across our region to inform the development of a Group Financial Inclusion Strategy. Through engagement with key stakeholders in some countries across the Asia-Pacific region we have extended our flagship financial education and capability programs using a partnership model. In Australia we have engaged stakeholders in a strategic review of our financial inclusion and capability programs and will make our key review findings public in 2012.

Customers

• Assisted more than 14,000 people facing hardship this year in Australia and New Zealand.
• Worked with customers and community groups to remove or eliminate 27 fees, which will deliver annualised benefits to customers of around $180m.
• Responded to customer feedback by streamlining our small business finance application process.
• Commissioned 50 separate pieces of customer research including focus groups, in-depth interviews and experiential pilots with customers to develop and refine products and services they most desire.
• Launched ANZ’s ‘Your Say’ online customer panel which more than 6000 customers have registered to join.

Employees

• Conducted the annual global ‘My Voice’ employee survey to measure staff engagement and gain staff input into areas for improvement.
  • Introduced a ‘blog’ for staff in Australia to communicate regularly and directly with the CEO of the Australian business.  This is in addition to ‘CEO Chat’ which is accessible to staff globally. Over the past year our CEO, Mike Smith, has met personally with over 9,700 employees through team briefings, office floor walks, internal team forums and meetings, branch visits and roundtables. Since October 2007, our CEO has met with more than 37,000 employees across our region.
  • Introduced ‘Techspeak’ a ‘blog’ for staff to share their views and comments on technology at ANZ directly with our Chief Information Officer.
  • Undertook an employee survey in Australia to improve the impact and participation in our workplace giving program.

Undertook a company-wide survey to better understand the diversity of our workforce to help us to measure progress overtime on workplace diversity and employment of people with disabilities. We asked our people across the globe to voluntarily self-identify their ethnic and cultural background, the languages they speak and, if relevant, their type of disability.

Suppliers

• Held workshops with suppliers in Australia, and consulted with the International Business Leaders Forum to develop a global approach to monitoring and improving our security service providers performance on human rights.
• Worked with our two most significant print partners, to incorporate carbon estimates into all print quotations.

2010 results

In 2010, in addition to maintaining strong relations with government and the investment community, our engagement program has helped us to:

• develop an aspirational set of standards for respecting human rights in our organisation and the communities in which we operate
• better connect and build meaningful relationships with stakeholders in China, as a key growth area for our business
• continue to deliver relevant and high-impact community investment programs that deliver on our stakeholders’ expectations.

We use the input of stakeholders to strengthen decision making and identify ways to improve products and processes. Key activities in 2010 included:

Government

• We contributed to the development of government policy and regulation of the financial industry throughout the year, including working with the Commonwealth of Australia Department of Treasury and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission on the transition to a national regulatory regime for consumer credit.
• In New Zealand, we continue to engage heavily with the New Zealand Securities Commission on the development of a licensing regime following the passage of the Financial Advisors Act. We have worked with Business New Zealand on a joint Australian and New Zealand government initiative to harmonise Trans-Tasman commercial regulatory and commercial legal frameworks, and have promoted the benefits to New Zealand of ANZ’s super regional strategy with ministers and government agencies. We also joined the New Zealand Parliament and Business Trust.

Shareholders

• In addition to formally reporting of our performance and financial results twice yearly, we also continue to conduct a regular series of visits by senior executives, including the CEO, to Asia (three to four times a year), the United Kingdom (twice a year) and United States (twice a year), as well as attending major investor conferences where appropriate.
• Every two years, including during 2010, ANZ conducts an ‘Asian Investor Tour’, with around 30-35 investors and analysts taken to Asia to visit our operations and meet the CEO of ANZ’s Asia Pacific, Europe and Americas (APEA) business and his senior management team.
• We have also engaged with a number of our major shareholders, who are demonstrating an increasing interest in our approach to managing social and environmental risks. For example, in 2010, our Chairman met with one of our largest shareholders to discuss our approach. These matters were also discussed at Board meetings throughout the year.

Our communities

• During 2010, we finalised our human rights standards, ‘Respecting People & Communities: ANZ’s approach to human rights.’ The standards were developed in consultation with stakeholders, including shareholders, staff, and 27 community and interest groups, including NGOs.
• We consulted with stakeholders to renew our specific targets for Indigenous employment at ANZ.
• We conducted regular partnership meetings to discuss our financial inclusion programs: Saver Plus, Progress Loans, MoneyMinded and other community programs. This included engaging with FaHCSIA regarding the MoneyBusiness partnership.
• We convened program committee meetings such as the Saver Plus Expansion Steering Committee, which involves ANZ, Brotherhood of St Laurence, Berry Street, Benevolent Society and the Government (FaHCSIA). This tri-sector collaboration was key to securing $13.5 million in funding from the Government to support the program’s expansion.
• This year we also established a Progress Loans research committee to commission evaluation of our innovation pilots, which involve ANZ, Brotherhood of St Laurence and FaHCSIA.
• We participated in speaking opportunities such as at the FaHCSIA Money Management Conference involving service agencies, Centrelink and other government agencies and Indigenous Money Management workers from communities across Australia.
• We conducted events such as the Saver Plus National Conference in August 2010 for all workers and managers involved in the delivery of Saver Plus nationally. Ten organisations were represented along with 60 Saver Plus workers, four program managers and various staff from the Saver Plus National Office.
• We shared our experience and expertise with our peers. For example, through our membership of the Australian Charities Fund (ACF) Employer Leadership Initiative, we engaged with seven other leading corporate employers on the future directions of Payroll Giving in Australia and advised ACF on its operations in support of the charity sector in Australia through workplace giving.

Customers

• We have engaged with financial counsellors at a state and national level and attended conferences or smaller financial counsellor network meetings, providing information on our approach to assisting customers facing financial hardship. These sessions enable us to capture feedback from the financial counselling community to better understand what we are doing well, areas for improvement, and any specific concerns financial counsellors have with individual customer cases.
• Our dedicated Customer Connect team engages with customers in Australia and New Zealand to provide advice and support to help customers manage and emerge from periods of financial difficulty. For example, during the year, our Customer Connect team was able to assist more than 10,000 customers facing financial hardship across Australia.

Employees

• Throughout 2010, our senior leaders worked with their teams to encourage a deeper understanding of the ‘ANZ Story’ (which describes who we are, what we stand for, where we are going and what success looks like) in order to energise employees around this new vision for our business and their opportunity to contribute to the next phase in the history of ANZ.
• Following the development and rollout of our ANZ values in 2009, we developed a two hour leader-led Values and Ethics training session for approximately 3,000 ANZ leaders. The session is designed to build line manager capability, equipping ANZ leaders and their teams with tools and knowledge to make values-based, ethical business decisions and create team behaviour standards that are in line with our values.
• Over 46,000 employees completed either our ‘Leading’ or ‘Understanding Risk in our World’ learning programs, which aim to reinforce the message that identifying and managing risk is everyone’s responsibility.