Vivriti Capital bagged the award for Best Financial Inclusion Initiative at DNA 2023 Awards from Banking Frontiers Jury. Highlights of their nomination:
As a purpose-driven organization, Vivriti Capital plays an integral role in financial inclusion efforts in the country through its innovative and evolving range of financial services. The distinguishing factor is that the company engages with its co-lending partners to expand the reach of its inclusive financing services to the bottom of the pyramid.
The company has embraced an ESG framework to address ESG risks and opportunities in its business practices and value chain through stakeholder engagement and stewardship practices. It is a market differentiator today, capturing sustainable business opportunities and creating long-term value for its stakeholders.
The company has now undertaken a mission, ‘Beyond Financial Inclusion’. Its target audience is individuals in the low-income category, women borrowers and individuals in urban and peri-urban regions.
Vivriti has an in-house client ESG risk assessment model called ‘Vivriti Sustainability Assessment Model’ or VSAM, which is used for client ESG risk scoring and reporting. The parameters covered in the client ESG assessments include:
- Environmental management, climate change risks, and opportunities management, GHG emissions, energy and water efficiency, material efficiency, water pollution, air pollutant emissions, waste management, etc.
- Human rights, employee development, equal opportunity, employment quality, employee safety, product responsibility, product safety, community support and development
- Business ethics, board structure and functioning, board diversity, committee functioning, financial audit and control, data privacy and security
- The taxonomy of the model is built on global sustainability frameworks like GRI, TCFD, and Indian ESG/sustainability reporting standards like BRR/BRSR.
The company has gone beyond inclusion to reach the financially deprived players and its ESG inclusive initiatives aim to uplift the sustainability performance of its client portfolio.
It has built its Theory of Change (TOC), which is a critical results-based tool to provide a better understanding of the underlying impact of the work. The TOC helps the company unpack the complexities of impact and change arising from targeted activities and measuring progress on the outputs and outcomes.
The campaign has a 3-year vision:
- Supporting the transition to a low carbon economy and portfolio diversity, and the lending and investing strategies have been tailored to proactively identify and harness greener and sustainable opportunities. Responsible investment and lending measures facilitate informed decision-making by helping us identify potential environmental and social risks.
- ESG risk assessment bolsters impact management as the company integrates best practices in assessing and monitoring impacts from risks and opportunities across its portfolio.
Vivriti has been continuously engaging with domain players in its sustainability endeavors. Its first such engagement was with RevFin, a pioneer in electric vehicle-financing (2 & 3 wheelers). The engagement demonstrated how RevFin could develop a robust framework to assess ESG risk and opportunities. Vivriti was one of the largest lenders of RevFin and it could catalyze the commercial debt market for the company by providing the much-needed term financing for its portfolio expansion.
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