Your bank sent a sustainability questionnaire. Here is how to answer it.

Banks increasingly attach sustainability questionnaires to loan reviews and onboarding. It is not box ticking for its own sake. Banks report under the CSRD and are assessed on the sustainability profile of their lending, so they need real figures from borrowers. That is why the request landed on you.

Why the bank is asking

• The bank reports its own financed emissions and sustainability exposure.
• To do that, it needs data from the businesses it lends to.
• Your questionnaire is the bank collecting that data from you.

How much they can require

Not without limit. Under the value chain cap, a bank cannot require a company with 1000 employees or fewer to provide more sustainability data than the VSME voluntary standard asks for. So a questionnaire that runs far beyond VSME is asking for more than it can demand. Knowing this changes the conversation from anxious compliance to answering a defined set.

Answer once, reuse everywhere

The trap is treating each bank's spreadsheet as a fresh project. Instead, produce one VSME Basic Module report and map it to whatever form arrives. Most bank questionnaires are asking, in their own layout, for the same underlying VSME datapoints: energy, emissions, workforce, health and safety, governance.

A practical way through it

Answer a guided flow over the VSME Basic Module, get a clean report plus a gap list, and use that as your master answer. When the next bank asks, you are copying from a document you already trust rather than starting over.

Common questions