SDG Disclosure Architecture in Banking: Evidence From Spanish Banks

ABSTRACT

Sustainable development goal (SDG) disclosure is difficult to assess in settings such as banking, where sustainability contributions are often indirect, process‐based and hard to observe. This study examines how ten Spanish‐headquartered banks structure and prioritise SDG‐related disclosure in non‐financial reports over 2020–2024. BERTopic is used to identify latent SDG‐related themes, examine their higher‐order semantic organisation and analyse temporal and cross‐bank variation. Topic‐based findings are triangulated with methodologically distinct SDG‐ and target‐level tagging of the same corpus. Results show that SDG disclosure is organised as a layered disclosure architecture combining a shared reporting repertoire, bank‐specific thematic portfolios and temporal reweighting of priorities. Consistent with the theoretical framework integrating Legitimacy, Stakeholder and Signalling theories, the findings reveal the coexistence of convergence and differentiation. The study also provides a transparent and reproducible text‐analytic workflow beyond SDG mention counts.