Sustainability Plan 2025-2028: when sustainability becomes a driver of growth
In a time of transformation for the financial ecosystem, Iberpay’s Sustainability Master Plan 2025-2028 redoubles its commitment to a business model that is more efficient, digital, resilient and socially responsible. The plan sets out a comprehensive strategy to align sustainability with the company's long-term vision, incorporating the Payments Sector Strategic Plan 2024-2025 and best practice from across the European financial sector.
Today, sustainability is key to building a resilient financial system. As the industry's critical infrastructure, Iberpay plays an active role in this endeavour, driving a transformation that goes beyond environmental sustainability to address social, technological and governance dimensions. The plan is the result of a deep dive into the issues, drawing on a double-materiality assessment that identifies Iberpay's main impacts on the environment and the major risks and opportunities it will face.
Key aims of the Sustainability Plan
The Master Plan sets out five strategic aims, aligned with ESG principles and designed to generate tangible value for the whole financial ecosystem:
- Align Iberpay's focus on sustainability with banking sector standards, making a coherent and robust contribution to the system’s sustainability.
- Open up the strategic opportunities of sustainable development, by designing new services and improving and strengthening the resilience of existing services, encouraging innovation and efficiency.
- Provide structured data-based information to leadership bodies to support well informed decision-making that looks to the long term.
- Give financial organisations the information they need to meet their non-financial reporting obligations, enhancing Iberpay's role in the value chain.
- Establish robust measurement and reporting mechanisms so the impact of ESG initiatives can be evaluated with total transparency.
Double materiality matrix
Sustainability is now established as an essential driver for the development of a modern, secure and resilient payment system. To build a robust strategy that meets today's challenges, Iberpay has conducted a double materiality assessment, which identifies not only the company’s impacts on the environment but also the risks and opportunities of a world transitioning to sustainability.
Its conclusions were a key input to creating a business-aligned sustainability plan that strengthens Iberpay's role as an agent of transformation. The plan defines a number of concrete areas for action, including energy efficiency, accessibility, responsible management, transparent governance and critical service continuity. In this way, Iberpay is advancing toward a model of sustainable growth that will create long-term value for the financial system, the company and all its stakeholders.
Action plan: from strategy to implementation
To achieve its aims, the plan lays out 20 specific measures, grouped into eight areas for action that bear directly on key issues such as energy efficiency, digitisation, fraud prevention and operational resilience.
The plan takes a holistic perspective and is structured around four priority areas, that reflect Iberpay's wide-ranging commitment to sustainability:
- Environment: Iberpay takes a data-based approach to the physical and transition risks linked to climate change. This includes measuring its carbon footprint, defining environmental monitoring indicators and developing specific mitigation and adaptation strategies. Together, these actions reflect a strengthened commitment to environmentally responsible management, which seeks to cut direct impacts and contribute to wider sustainability goals. It has also set up systems for regular reporting which guarantee the transparency and traceability of the company's environmental performance.
- Social: Iberpay has redoubled its commitment to an organisational culture based on equality, inclusion and respect for fundamental rights. It has reinforced its equal opportunities policy by updating the Equalities Plan and is making progress on inclusion of people with disabilities. It also promotes an ethical and socially responsible value chain, through an ethical code that is shared across its own workforce and suppliers. At the same time, it is safeguarding universal access to cash as a vital factor in financial inclusion, making sure everyone has equal and secure access to their money as and when they want.
- Governance: Iberpay is energising the move to instant payments by rolling out key initiatives like Request to Pay (SRTP) and promoting mass take-up of instant payments (SCT Inst). It is also consolidating anti-fraud measures with services such as Payguard and Valitic, that help improve the security of the payments ecosystem. Finally, Iberpay now prepares an annual sustainability report that meets the voluntary reporting standard for SMEs, making it easier for participants to meet their obligations under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
- Sector – Operational resilience: Iberpay is reinforcing its business continuity strategy to deal with operational, technology or cyber incidents and make sure the payment system remains stable, available and reliable under all circumstances. This area for action will guarantee uninterrupted provision of critical services, not only for the economy and citizens but also for banks and connected organisations that rely on Iberpay's infrastructure to deliver secure and efficient payment services.
The Sustainability Plan 2025-2028 is a transformative roadmap that connects Iberpay's strategic vision with the real challenges of its operating environment. With this plan, the company has redoubled its contribution to a more secure, resilient, efficient and sustainable payment system that builds in ESG criteria at a structural level and works actively with the banks and stakeholders in the network.
