Ideagen’s Acquisition Of CompliSpace Highlights An Industry-Wide Movement For GRC And EHS To Drive The Growing Focus Of ESG

Ideagen’s Acquisition Of CompliSpace Highlights An Industry-Wide Movement For GRC And EHS To Drive The Growing Focus Of ESG

On November 9th Ideagen, a UK-based EHS and quality software provider, made its largest ever acquisition, worth £57.7 million, of Sydney-based governance, risk and compliance (GRC) provider CompliSpace. The immense value of the acquisition highlights a greater industry-wide trend to utilize GRC and EHS strategy to drive the growing focus on a firm’s ESG programs.

Ideagen provides software and services to firms that require regulation across EHSQ, audit and risk, by offering specialized software packages for each of its key areas. CompliSpace was founded in 2007 to provide GRC services to firms who would not originally have the expertise or resources to conduct it themselves via a software as a service deployment mechanism. The acquisition benefits Ideagen’s offering through expansion into the GRC space and expands the firm’s footprint into Australia and education, aged care and financial service industries. However, the acquisition is likely to have greater benefits resulting from the newfound synergy.

EHS functions have long been important in data collection and reporting. However, these functions are becoming increasingly more important especially with the precedence of environmental data capture in a move to a net-zero economy. Verdantix’s ESG global cooperate survey found that 33% of respondents identified EHS as the most significant business function to implementing sustainability strategies. The report also found ESGs data dispersity within a firm to be a significant barrier to improving sustainability data.

Ideagen’s newfound incorporation of GRC into EHS offerings can aid in centralising this data and fix a disjointed ESG information architecture. The maturity of the GRC ecosystem aids in coupling nascent elements of ESG with seasoned reporting and multi-functional risk and compliance management that has been pivotal for firms to quantify and aggregate important metrics.

EHS is a strong foundation with key datasets neatly embedded into its framework. The integration of GRC into this framework optimises the foundation to build a strong structure of compliance and governance as it can also utilise these datasets. This then lends itself well to a world that is slowly moving away from voluntary sustainability reporting to a regulated one.

The coupling of EHS with GRC mechanisms can look to aid a firm’s drive to meet its sustainability goals and consolidate a gathering place for ESG metrics.