Apart from less entrepreneur-friendly banking services, a lack of entrepreneurial qualities in entrepreneurs makes entrepreneurship challenging. As a result, banking experiences difficulties in accessing entrepreneurs as customers. Creating shared value (CSV) is a model for business that overcomes these socioeconomic challenges by converting social issues into three pillars: reconceiving markets and products, redefining value chains, and developing local clusters. Banking has a conservative business model in which it is difficult to simultaneously achieve the above three pillars of CSV for the three dimensions of banking, i.e., client prosperity, regional economic growth, and solutions to financial problems. This study investigated the key to the simultaneous achievement of the three pillars of CSV by aligning social issues with the value chain. We conducted a qualitative case study of City Alo in Bangladesh, a female-centered banking segment of City Bank, that offers a university-collaborated entrepreneurship education course as well as small and medium enterprise banking products to female entrepreneurs. The findings indicate that in CSV of banking, entrepreneurs are the source of economic growth and entrepreneurship education promotes client prosperity. Therefore, entrepreneurs overcome entrepreneurship barriers to achieve success in their field and the bank becomes more active by accessing many entrepreneurs as customers.

Corporate sustainability (CS) has drawn the attention of academics and practitioners as a way to achieve profitable businesses without negatively impacting society. However, financial business organizations have not adequately realized the importance of CS in meeting sustainable development goals (SDGs). Thus, it is unclear how the financial sector will achieve the SDGs using CS. All 17 goals are essential, but achieving them depends on which CS issues the organization prioritizes. This study uses a qualitative case study to investigate the use of CS to achieve SDGs at financial corporations. Interviews were conducted with five respondents from City Alo, an SME banking segment of City Bank in Bangladesh, and 15 women entrepreneurs engaging with this organization to receive entrepreneurship education through a bank–university collaboration. The results show that the private banking organization achieved seven SDGs by prioritizing appropriate CS issues.