Greening financial market

Abstract

The idea of Corporate Social Responsibility is one of the most inspiring ideas in modern business, also even in financial business. CSR, already widely implemented in economy, contains significant ecological components. Nowadays, around the world many leading banks, investment funds, pension funds, insurance companies and public companies, use environmental aspects in their business. The growing and diversified ecological engagement of different financial institutions could be even called ecological evolution of financial business.

The same process has started also in Poland. The financial institutions support natural environment in many ways: saving resources, financing proecological organizations, maintaining adequate PR and IR communication and even offering special financial products such as: deposits, payment cards, shares, bonds, investment funds and specialized stock index Respect. Especially, the new investment possibilities are clear evidence of positive changes of the Polish financial market.

The aim of the elaboration is to indicate the phenomenon of environmental rules implementation in Polish financial business. The considerations in the article are focused on financial offer related to natural environment protection. The issue is presented in two aspects: theoretical and empirical. In the article, critical analysis of literature and reports, analysis of financial market data, induction method and comparison method have been used. Especially, selected financial products offered on Polish financial market were analysed in the period of 2008–2014 in respect to ecological criteria.

The problem of financial market “ecologization” is a very important subject of scientific research. The process is not only very inspiring, but also controversial.