The quality of voluntary sustainability reports in the Italian cooperative credit banks

Abstract

This paper focuses on the sustainability information voluntarily disclosed by Italian mutual banks or credit cooperative banks (CCBs) over the period 2015–2019. Our paper aims to contribute to the increasing debate on sustainability in banking sectors by investigating the quality of disclosure by Italian mutual banks, a peculiar non-profit category of banks which combine the value maximization for their stakeholders with the development of the local economy. We selected the Italian co-operative credit sector as it is one of the largest markets in Europe. We analyzed the quality of voluntary sustainability disclosure, in the light of the legitimacy theory, building an ad hoc framework which combines the three main CSR guidelines at international, national and local level (GRI, ABI and Federcasse) for Italian CCBs and content-analyzing each SR issued by the sampled CCBs. Our findings highlight a low general quality of the CSR information disclosure and a not homogeneous quality score for the different disclosed NFI category. Limits, future research directions and implications are provided.