The Financial Guidelines aim to establish a common understanding for the assessment of bankability of energy efficiency services projects. They are targeted for the use of financial institutions, energy services providers and clients. Furthermore, these guidelines define minimum financial information that is required for financial institutions to assess energy efficiency services.

The Financial Guidelines should be interpreted in the context of the Guidelines of European Technical Quality Criteria. Whereas the Technical Quality Criteria are primarily targeted at potential energy efficiency services clients, enabling them to identify poor projects from good quality-projects, the Financial Guidelines are targeted at financial institutions and aim to support them to assess bankability of EES projects by means of a set of financial quality criteria.

These guidelines have been developed to sit alongside a procurement handbook to provide a toolkit for the procurement and quality assessment of energy efficiency services.