Esteemed stakeholders,

As a team, we are all proud and honored to be sharing our first sustainability report with you in our 150^th year in business.

Mindful of its stakeholders under every condition and conducting its activities so as to create the highest possible value for them, Ziraat Bank has successfully overcome every hardship faced by our country and the world over the last century and a half. Not just a witness to history, our Bank spearheaded economic and social progress and has always stood beside and supported this country’s people in a period spanning the final years of the Ottoman Empire and the entire history of the Republic of Turkey.

The vast knowledge and experience that Ziraat Bank has built up over the years have made it the natural leader of its sector.

Today Ziraat Bank provides employment directly to about 25 thousand people. In some 400 of Turkey’s small towns located all over the country it is the only local financial services provider. Today Ziraat Bank is gearing up for the future as a global player and is advancing sure-footedly in that direction.

Our responsibility, stakeholders, sustainability, and Ziraat Bank
We are aware that our fundamental responsibility at this point is to pass on a livable world and a sustainable future for the generations that come after us. For this reason, we regard sustainability as an essential guide that will show us the way forward as we build that sustainable future.

Ziraat Bank has a broad and widespread stakeholder base. Shareholders, employees, customers, and suppliers make up our core stakeholder group. Regulatory agencies, international banks and investors, media, professional bodies and associations, and the public at large are actors that we communicate on a daily basis also.

We are focused to carry on our activities within collaboration, respect and balance with our stakeholders, and we regard this as a crucial aspect of sustainability.

In our view, sustainability means ensuring the viability of an ecosystem that will allow our stakeholders to satisfy their needs in the future at least as well as they do today.

Sustainability rests upon a straightforward principle. Sustainability reveals the conditions that are necessary for people and nature to exist in productive harmony and it provides opportunities not just to us but to future generations as well to satisfy everyone’s social, economic, and communal needs.

This is why we regard the issues of climate change, transition to a low-carbon economy, and social development that have been high-priority items on the world’s agenda for the last two decades as equally important for ourselves and why we have accepted, as our ultimate goal, making a positive difference in this direction through our product and service processes.

We sincerely believe that companies today must be mindful of the future of the society and environment in which they live and that they must be actively engaged in making improvements and progress on such matters in order to ensure the sustainability of their own growth and profitability.

We give great importance to managing and reducing our ecological footprint.
We know that our own industry’s environmental impact is low compared with other business endeavors. However we also know that even the smallest individual effort is important in achieving global objectives and therefore we focus on properly and effectively managing our environmental impact and use of natural resources, including but not limited to, energy and water. At the same time, we also intend to meticulously abide by sustainability principles in our product and service processes and to author projects that will serve as guides for our stakeholders, constitute best practices in our sector, and be inspiring to all. In short, we intend to be role models in the matter of sustainability as well.

For a hundred and fifty years Ziraat Bank has been marshaling its unrivaled knowledge and experience to correctly interpret the priorities of a changing world and to act accordingly. It continues to do so today. It will do no less than that tomorrow. Indeed we are committed to increasing our strength and contributions in all aspects of sustainability for we know that we have the corporate capacity necessary to accomplish this.

The role of our employees
Our employees have always lain at the heart of our success. Our employees have begun to play an active role on sustainability issues and it gives us great pleasure to see that they are doing so.

Fully implementing the sustainability policy that we announced in 2014 and ultimately extending it throughout the entire Ziraat Finance Group will only be possible through the strong engagement and efforts of our team. With this in mind, I call upon our employees to understand and accept that sustainability is a way of life and not just a corporate goal and to act as a role model on this issue for those around them.

Through even the smallest roles that they are capable of playing, our nearly 25 thousand employees will make a big contribution towards our efforts to create the broad social impact that we wish to have. Ziraat Bank’s goal is to make its employees even more motivated on sustainability issues and to encourage them to participate voluntarily in dealing with them.

Ziraat Bank’s sustainable future
Having laid out its own growth roadmap in line with Turkey’s medium- and long-term vision and objectives, Ziraat Bank continues to advance confidently into the future.

Having successfully been “more than a bank” for a century and a half, Ziraat Bank will continue to be the preferred choice of millions of customers in every segment and to create enduring value in the medium- and long-term future as well through its unrivaled service quality and its diversified product and service channels.

We regard corporate sustainability as a basic tool for achieving the aims briefly set out above. We also recognize that sustainability is an objective that we must ultimately achieve in order to compete under the conditions of tomorrow’s markets and to maintain our presence in them as a global player.
Our Bank has a century and a half of experience of successfully balancing leadership and responsibility. Thanks to our customers’ choices, our employees’ willingness, and our suppliers’ long-term collaboration, we will remain Turkish banking industry’s most highly respected member and a source of its pride.

Before bringing this message to an end, I want to invite all of our stakeholders to engage in frank communication and close cooperation with us. Let us never forget that it is only by working together that we can keep and improve the world as a livable place capable of fully meeting our present and future needs.

I also invite everyone to send any feedback they may have about Ziraat Bank’s sustainability performance as well as about issues that we can address together to us at surdurulebilirlik@ziraatbank.com.tr.

Speaking personally and on behalf of the Ziraat Bank Board of Directors, I express my gratitude to everyone for trusting, contributing to, supporting, and choosing the Ziraat Bank brand.

Very truly yours,