This Sustainability Report covers the essential developments in, and progress made by, DZ BANK AG in the area of sustainability for the reporting year 2018. It builds on the GRI disclosures for 2017 and is intended for all our stakeholders. Since 2008, DZ BANK AG has been using its Sustainability Reports to provide regular updates on the progress it is making in terms of financial performance, the environment, and corporate citizenship. The key performance indicators we have used are based on the period January 1 to December 31, 2018 but for especially significant events the period has been extended up to the publishing deadline of April 30, 2019. Qualitative and quantitative data has been collected locally at departmental level and analyzed by the Communication, Marketing, CR division. DZ BANK AG and its activities are the exclusive subjects of this report. Where any content refers to groupwide activities, this is made clear in the text. The DZ BANK AG 2018 management report contains a list of DZ BANK's shareholdings and principal shareholdings (subsidiaries and joint ventures) (p. 185 et seq.). Employee data in the report relates to all DZ BANK AG locations. In this report, environmental data is reported more transparently in accordance with scopes 1 and 2, but also on the basis of the indicators of the Verein für Umweltmanagement und Nachhaltigkeit in Finanzinstituten (VfU) [German Association for Environmental Management and Sustainability in Financial Institutions]. We report on our coverage of the environmental KPIs accordingly. This report was prepared in accordance with the GRI Standards: Core option. We used a materiality analysis to identify the material topics. This was based on a 2015 stakeholder survey on our sustainability activities, the first such survey to be conducted at group level. It builds on DZ BANK’s 2012 survey, in which external and internal stakeholders were surveyed for the first time. There were no restatements of information in the reporting year. The 2018 report is published online. There was also no change in reporting in comparison with previous reports. In the interests of readability, we have not written out the bank’s full legal name. The next Sustainability Report is scheduled to appear in 2020.