Commercial Banks and Competition Concerns—SDG Policy Priorities

The tsunami of sustainable transition, at the global and the EU level, has not spared the banking sector and commercial banking found itself in the whirlwind of change, which has historically been a stranger to incorporating concerns that are not purely financial. As with other public and private organizations, the progress in terms of sustainable conduct depended to a large extent on individual effort and drive of decision-makers in an individual organization, until regulation changed the rules of the game for the sector at large. The present chapter serves as an empirical account of the challenges of the NLB Group, as the most influential commercial bank in the geographical area of Balkans, in transitioning its business model to align with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, as well as a tool for a critical assessment of the quality of the EU legal framework. By giving an informed account of the experience of a universal bank, operating in a geographical niche with fragmented smaller markets in South-Eastern European region, with limited attention from large, global banks, that strategically embarked on a path of a holistic sustainable transformation, the present chapter provides a deeper insight into the challenges that arise with such a transformation, especially in the case of divergent legislative frameworks faced by a bank group.