Addressing Social Issues through Our Business and Creating Shared Value to “Sow Happiness in the World”
—SDGs Management and Creation of Value—
Masahiko Moriyama
Representative Director and President of T&D Holdings, Inc.
Under the banner of the Group Long-Term Vision “Try & Discover 2025 – In Pursuit of the Happiness of All Stakeholders,” which demonstrates our medium-to long-term goals and strategic policies to achieve them, we defined the T&D Insurance Group's Management Vision as “Sow happiness, make change with boldness,” and we set five primary themes to work on in order to achieve this vision. As one of these primary themes, we highlight “SDGs management and creation of value.” We have established non-financial KPIs to quantitatively measure the creation of social value, and we are actively pursuing the “creation of shared value” that achieves a balance between economic and social value.
In pursuing the “creation of shared value,” the Group has identified, among the various sustainability fields that relate to its business activities, social issues that are highly important to society and are highly relevant to its operations, and has established four “sustainability priority themes” as follows.
＜Sustainability priority themes＞
- Promote Heathy and Abundant Lives for People
- Provide Workplace Environments that Enable Diverse Human Resources to Participate Actively
- Contribute to Global Environment Conservation and Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation
- Invest to Help Build a Sustainable Society
The life insurance business, which is the Group’s core business, is a highly public business based on the philosophy of mutual aid. It is also a sustainable business that offers long-term peace of mind and safety to customers. It is the Group’s mission as well as its opportunity for growth to address customers’ various risks posed by social changes, including the declining birthrate and aging population. We will contribute to the realization of a sustainable society by making a positive impact on the world through promoting healthy and abundant lives for our customers.
The Group is taking steps to enhance our human capital. Under our human resources development policy of nurturing autonomous individuals who think for themselves, take proactive action, and achieve the expected results, we are promoting the development of a leadership base to drive the Group’s growth, as well as providing educational opportunities for growth and supporting active roles for female employees. We will adopt a multi-dimensional, ongoing approach to create an environment where all employees, regardless of gender, can work comfortably and with enthusiasm. This includes efforts such as promoting diversity, practicing health management, and enhancing work-life balance. At the T&D Insurance Group, we believe that our human resources, working side-by-side, are the most important driving force behind our business activities to fulfill the T&D Insurance Group's corporate philosophy. Since its foundation, the Group has established the Basic Group Policy on Human Resources which aims to clarify the basic policy for human resource management within the Group. By securing and developing human resources with advanced expertise, knowledge and skills, and creating opportunities for them to play an active role, we will drive the sustainable growth of the Group.
The Group is taking initiatives toward realizing a decarbonized society.
As a concrete measure, we set “CO2 emissions” as one of the non-financial KPIs in the Group Long-Term Vision and are working to reduce these emissions. One characteristic of the Group, whose core business is the life insurance business, is that the majority of its CO2 emissions come from electricity use. To this end, the Group has joined the international initiative of RE100, aiming to source 100% of the electricity used in its business activities from renewable energy, and is promoting the use of renewable energy for its electricity use. Aiming to achieve net zero emissions as soon as possible, we are accelerating the reduction of CO2 emissions toward FY2025, the final year of the Group Long-Term Vision.
As a responsible institutional investor, we make investments with consideration for the environment, society, and corporate governance. We have set interim reduction targets for CO2 emissions from our own investments by FY2030 and are working to reduce them. In order to achieve this goal, we encourage our investment and loan partners to take decarbonization measures through engagement, while supporting our investment and loan partners in addressing climate change issues from a financing perspective by engaging in financing projects that use funds from decarbonization investments and others.
Meanwhile, we have also begun to analyze biodiversity risks and opportunities related to our business in order to implement business activities that take biodiversity conservation into consideration.
Additionally, our asset management operations as an institutional investor are closely tied to economic development and the achievement of a sustainable society. The Group will contribute to the realization of a sustainable society through its own operations.
The T&D Insurance Group CSR Charter sets out “respect for human rights” as a common concept in all of these priority sustainability themes, and we promote business activities that respect the human rights of the Group’s officers and employees as well as all stakeholders. As a concrete action, we have established the “T&D Insurance Group Human Rights Policy” and are conducting human rights due diligence to identify, prevent, and mitigate any negative impact on human rights that the Group’s business activities may have. Specifically, to maintain and improve a workplace environment where employees can fully utilize their abilities, we have identified long working hours and harassment as key areas for human rights due diligence, and we are striving to identify and correct human rights issues. We will continue to conduct human rights due diligence and promote measures to respect human rights.
We believe that our commitment to SDGs management and addressing social issues will lead to us creating shared value and sowing happiness in the world. We, the T&D Insurance Group, aim to be an insurance group that grows sustainably alongside society, and we will continue to advance toward this goal step by step.
April 2024