Eco-Banking in Relation to Financial Performance of the Sector—The Evidence from Poland

With the advent of corporate social responsibility, practical aspects of environmental responsibility have gained importance and recognition among both manufacturing and service enterprises, including financial services. This trend is also evidenced extensively in the literature. On the other hand, the literature reveals a significant gap in the research into the matter of environmental responsibility of banks in the light of their financial effectiveness. In addition, the European Union (EU) regulations require banking entities to provide reports of any activities related to protection of natural resources. Two important dilemmas arise in this context—how to measure the environmental involvement of the banking sector and how to relate this type of involvement to the sector’s financial effectiveness? We applied Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), linear ordering methods—standardized sum method and synthetic measure of development, Pearson’s and Spearman’s correlation coefficients, Student’s t and Mann-Whitney U tests and boxplots to measure environmental responsibility of banks and to examine the empirical relationship between environmental engagement and bank financial performance data. We also used analytical methods for the study of financial and non-financial reports of banks. We posited three research hypotheses related to measurement of environmental involvement of banks (ecologization) and to correlations between the sector’s financial effectiveness and its environmental involvement. The study does not confirm any direct influence of banks’ financial results upon the scale of their environmental involvement. Based on the above, the we also made an attempt at explaining the results and identifying directions of further research into the subject.