This study entitled “Children’s Rights and Finance: How the Swiss and Liechtenstein financial industry can promote and protect children’s rights” focuses on lending, investment and underwriting business with the goal to improve awareness of the corporate responsibility to respect and promote children’s rights. It aims to emphasize the significance of children as stakeholders in the financial industry’s activities and to highlight how financial institutions’ decisions concerning governance, strategy, risk management and products and services can have positive or negative impacts on children. Finally, this study provides practical recommendations on how Swiss and Liechtenstein financial industry can promote and protect children’s rights.
The ten key recommendations, which are addressed to banks, wealth and asset managers, insurance companies, and other important stakeholders in the financial industry, are summarized below:
Recommendations to financial institutions
- Apply a ‘child-lens approach’ to governance, strategy, risk management, and products and services, and commit to upholding children’s rights
- Consider children’s rights in the double-materiality assessment and disclose accordingly
- Recognize the positive and negative impacts of all financial products and services on children (directly and indirectly via parents and caregivers); when material adverse impacts are possible, conduct due diligence
- As part of sustainable finance or environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing strategies, conduct positive screening to identify companies with above-average performance in relation to children’s rights and create innovative products
- Improve stewardship and engagement with clients and investee companies to promote children’s rights
- Include children’s and human rights considerations in the financial institution’s net-zero transition plan and strive for a just and inclusive transition
- Participate in multi-stakeholder initiatives to increase leverage and seek expertise to promote children’s rights
Recommendations to other key stakeholders
- Corporate and institutional clients of financial institutions should commit to respecting the rights of children
- ESG research companies, data providers and reporting standard-setters should contribute to the availability of meaningful and comparable data
- Regulators and policymakers should cover children’s rights comprehensively beyond child labour and along the entire value chain and hold financial institutions accountable to the same standards as other companies
