Strategic Priorities
The Scottish National Investment Bank is Scotland’s development bank. Our central priority remains to invest in businesses and projects that support delivery of our missions and provide a commercial, risk-adjusted financial return.
To achieve this, we will continue to invest for the long-term making equity investments, providing debt or, where necessary, investing in third party funds. Our investments are also designed to enable other investors to deploy their capital – attracting private sector financing to complement our own. As a development bank our risk appetite must therefore be greater than the majority of other investors so that we can help Scotland to attract increasing levels of investment capital, which will be required for us to deliver against our missions.
Our missions drive everything we do and are designed to reflect key challenges facing Scotland. These missions are:
◆ Net Zero: Address the climate crisis through growing a fair and sustainable economy.
◆ Place: Transform communities, making them places where everyone thrives.
◆ Innovation: Scale up innovation and technology, for a more competitive and productive economy.
The Bank’s strategy remains consistent and is set out in more detail within our Business Plan, and we are delivering strongly against it. Our key strategic themes articulated in our Business Plan are:
For each of these areas, we are already progressing well against our target outcomes, with a detailed breakdown of this set out in the following section.
As an impact investor our investments provide both financial and non-financial returns. Over the past financial year we reviewed how we can most efficiently and effectively support the delivery of our missions. Full details of this work, along with our performance to date, are set out in our separate Impact Report.
The strength of our delivery and the clarity of the future impact we can make is based on our talented and motivated team, which is why realising the potential of our people remains a key strategic priority for us.
The Bank’s Impact Ambitions
At the Bank we are committed to maximising the impact of our investments. As part of evolving our approach to impact, and following industry best practice, in 2023 we developed our first set of ‘impact ambitions’.
These are quantified targets for the headline impacts we want to achieve within each mission; they provide a “north star” for the Bank, designed to drive focus and intent in our investment decisions. We have set the targets to 2030 to represent the Bank’s focus on long-term positive outcomes for people and planet.
We are ambitious for the positive impact we can have within Scotland, and excited to make a real difference to peoples lives and to the environment that surrounds us all. In developing our ambitions, we are following a principle of continuous improvement – acknowledging the importance of learning and adapting as we (and our portfolio) mature over the coming years, and looking for opportunities to increase the impact effectiveness of our investments wherever possible. We will calculate our impact performance using a contribution based analysis. In this way, we include only the proportional share of impact that can be attributed to our investment. The total impact achieved by our portfolio companies will therefore exceed what is captured within our reporting.
