The financial sector plays an important yet ambivalent role in society's sustainability transition. Credit decisions have a substantialimpact as they determine the allocation of large amounts of financial resources. This study applies the Frameworkfor Strategic Sustainable Development as a lens to review literature and investigate practices in Nordic banks on sustainabilityconsiderations in corporate credit risk assessment. Three gaps and recommendations are presented: (i) banks should apply asystems perspective that goes beyond a narrow focus on climate change to avoid sub-optimisation;(ii) strategies like inclusionand exclusion should be informed by backcasting from basic sustainability principles to foresee the long-termdirection of changeand to assess whether solutions are scalable towards sustainability; and (iii) instead of asking whether it ‘pays to be sustainable’,research and practice should focus on ‘how’ companies can work strategically with sustainability, finding the optimal timingbetween being too passive and too proactive.