Perspectives by green financial instruments – a case study in the Hungarian banking sector during COVID-19

  • Received December 28, 2022;
    Accepted February 9, 2023;
    Published March 9, 2023
  • Author(s)
  • DOI
    http://dx.doi.org/10.21511/bbs.18(1).2023.10
  • Article Info
    Volume 18 2023, Issue #1, pp. 116-126
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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.

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    • Figure 1. Residential and corporate knowledge of green financial products
    • Figure 2. The problems of GHP from the customers’ point of view as of June 2022
    • Figure 3. Sectoral investment interest of residential (outer arc) and corporate (inner arc) respondents (June 2022)
    • Figure 4. Eco-consciousness of residential and corporate respondents
    • Figure 5. The activity of banks related to the establishment of a green transition plan with climate goals
    • Figure 6. The activity of banks related to the establishment of sustainable credit risk plans at the end of 2021
    • Conceptualization
      Anita Boros, Csaba Lentner
    • Data curation
      Anita Boros
    • Formal Analysis
      Anita Boros, Csaba Lentner, Vitéz Nagy, Dávid Tőzsér
    • Investigation
      Anita Boros, Csaba Lentner
    • Methodology
      Anita Boros
    • Project administration
      Anita Boros, Csaba Lentner, Vitéz Nagy, Dávid Tőzsér
    • Supervision
      Anita Boros, Csaba Lentner, Vitéz Nagy, Dávid Tőzsér
    • Validation
      Anita Boros, Csaba Lentner, Vitéz Nagy, Dávid Tőzsér
    • Visualization
      Anita Boros, Dávid Tőzsér
    • Writing – original draft
      Anita Boros, Dávid Tőzsér
    • Writing – review & editing
      Anita Boros, Csaba Lentner, Vitéz Nagy, Dávid Tőzsér