Vitéz Nagy

Recently, the management of the green financial sector has been widely influenced by global socio-economic concerns such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the energy crisis. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate, besides their environmental attitude, what opinions and experiences the affected stakeholders have about the sustainability-related processes in the Hungarian banking sector in the early 2020s. To assess this subject extensively, two questionnaire surveys were conducted in two consecutive years (2020/2021 and 2021/2022), involving 600 and 1,600 participants randomly chosen from banking databases, respectively. The results indicate that both residential and corporate participants have various but broadening knowledge of green financial instruments. Hungarian residential customers have pointed out the inconveniences of the most popular green loan product (Green Home Program), while there appears a distinct difference in green investment preferences between the two groups of respondents. Hungarian stakeholders are quite eco-conscious, and so are banks adopting sustainability and climate risk assessment actions, however, the implementations have much potential to exploit. Respondents also identify the energy crisis-related risks, while their trust in the banking system remains high even under volatile circumstances. These findings demonstrate that the Hungarian green banking sector has a high degree of crisis resistance with residential and corporate stakeholders behind giving trust and thereby the driving force toward the successful green transition.

The study focuses on corporate social responsibility, which is of pivotal significance in the banking sectors of the countries of the so-called Visegrád Group, located in the Central European region and representing similar levels of economic development (V4). The aim of this paper is to examine the changes in the CSR activities of notable banks in the V4 countries between 2007, 2013 and 2018. The study consisted of three phases: first, it determined the relevant CSR goals based on the content (document) analysis; then, a questionnaire survey was conducted among banks for three years (2007, 2013, 2018); and finally, the data were analyzed using variance analysis. As a result of the first phase, 15 CSR activities were identified, and as a result of a questionnaire survey, the focus of each CSR area was presented on a spider-web diagram showing a shift in the “priority order” of CSR areas and target groups, in other words, the intensification of activity towards social groups closer to the activities of banks or even clients. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, this study confirmed with primary research that the focus of CSR activities in the V4 countries has shifted from general societal challenges to climate protection and the development of financial culture. These results were also evidenced by multivariate statistical methods proving a significant change in 66% of the examined areas.