A bank financing a construction company looks especially at three things when asking sustainability questions: which materials are used and where they come from, how much fuel is needed to transport to and from the construction site, and whether there are already client requirements that your company must pass on. This combination is specific to construction, because material use and construction logistics are simply the areas where most emissions in this sector originate.
These questions do not come out of nowhere. Banks themselves are subject to rules that require them to provide insight into the climate risks of their credit portfolio, and they obtain part of that insight from the companies they finance. For a construction company, this often means a questionnaire that starts with the energy consumption of the office and warehouse, but quickly extends to materials, vehicle fleet, and subcontractors.
Material use: why the bank asks about this
Cement, steel, and to a lesser extent wood are materials with relatively high emissions per kilogram of produced material. A bank seeking to assess the climate risks of a construction company therefore often asks about the quantities of materials purchased, and sometimes about their origin. This does not need to be an exact lifecycle assessment; for most financing inquiries, an overview based on your purchasing records, supplemented with the applicable emission factors, is sufficient.
The difference with the questionnaire you receive from a major client lies in the purpose. A client wants to know what flows through their own supply chain; a bank wants to know how sensitive your business operations are to future regulation or price fluctuations in materials. Both questions can amount to the same thing, but the reason behind them is different.
Transport to the construction site
The second major item is transport: your own delivery vans and trucks, material transport by suppliers, and commuting of staff who travel to varying construction sites. Banks usually ask about fuel consumption here, and that is precisely the figure you already have through fuel receipts or a fuel card statement. Once you have compiled this overview, you can simply reuse it in the next questionnaire — from a bank, insurer, or client.
Subcontractors and third-party equipment
Many construction companies work with subcontractors or rent equipment. A bank sometimes asks whether you have visibility into the emissions associated with this, even though it is not your own vehicle fleet. Here it is especially important to distinguish between what you can provide from your own records and what remains an estimate. A bank does not expect exact figures about a subcontractor's fuel consumption, but does expect clarity about what is and is not included.
Client requirements that have downstream effects
If your company works for major clients who themselves are subject to reporting obligations, there is a good chance they have already imposed requirements on you regarding material use or CO2 reporting. A bank often asks explicitly about this, because it indicates how well your company is already prepared for stricter requirements further down the supply chain. It is therefore worthwhile to keep questionnaires you have already received and answered from clients separately — not because the bank wants to see them verbatim, but because the underlying figures can often be reused.
What you can prepare
Most of the data that a bank requests is not new measurement but a different ordering of what is already in the administration: the energy bill, the fuel receipts, the purchasing figures for materials and possibly a summary of previous questionnaires from clients. For companies dealing with this for the first time, it is often useful to review by topic what is relevant for your own situation; on esgia.eu you will find that by topic what applies to your sector.
Whether a bank may ask your specific company for more or less information than the voluntary EU standard for SMEs is not regulated in the same way in all cases as it is for a supplier receiving questions from a large buyer. For questions about your own financing situation, the bank itself, or a lawyer, is the appropriate party to assess that.
Those who want to see how such a dossier is built in practice will read how the data ends up in the dossier. And if you are unsure whether this already applies to your company, the free quick scan provides an indication of your situation in a few questions. Other construction companies that encountered this type of questions earlier can be found in answers to questions that other construction companies asked.
Do you want to know where you stand for your own company? Take the free quick scan or view the topic page — both are accessible without an account.