Getting It Right The First Time: Leveraging Independent Expertise In ESG Software Selection

Getting It Right The First Time: Leveraging Independent Expertise In ESG Software Selection

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Preparing for mandatory ESG disclosures 

Verdantix has been covering the role of ESG and sustainability in global businesses since 2008. For most of this period, there were very limited economic or policy incentives for ESG investments, and so the markets for sustainable products and services remained small. Most large firms were content to roll out annual sustainability reports and respond to voluntary reporting bodies with unverified data.

In the last two years, we have seen this trend begin to shift, as investors start to ask more demanding and searching questions of firms around ESG. Why are they doing this? It’s certainly not due to a collective epiphany that saving the planet is all that matters. It’s because they have seen the writing on the wall and the direction of travel of government policy and legislation around the world (see Verdantix Strategic Focus: ESG Regulations Around the Globe). As a result, they now view poor ESG performance as a business performance risk.

For businesses, this move from voluntary to mandatory reporting is a multi-layered challenge. Not only do firms need to grapple with what’s required with the new regulations – they must also identify the sources of the necessary data and ensure the information is investor-grade quality (see Verdantix Strategic Focus: Transitioning To Investor-Grade ESG Data And Decision-Making). In the rush to meet regulatory requirements, businesses – and their professional advisors – have fallen back on their trusty all-purpose tool: the Excel spreadsheet. Make no mistake, there is no-one that enjoys a good old spreadsheet more than me. However, our contention is that developing an enterprise-wide approach to operationalizing ESG data management on a spreadsheet platform is both a short- and a long-term risk.  

Risk management: moving away from Excel 

Luckily, there is a range of robust digital solutions that can make ESG reporting and data collection more efficient and structured, and can drive the necessary data quality. In fact, the challenge now sits within understanding the capabilities of the vendors of these solutions, in a time- and cost-effective manner. At Verdantix, our Advisory team supports with this exact challenge. Using our independent, transparent and market-leading Green Quadrant methodology (see Verdantix Green Quadrant: ESG Reporting And Data Management Software), our team help fit the right ESG reporting and data management software solution to firms’ internal business requirements. 

Critical steps for selecting your provider 

In our upcoming webinar, Stuart Neumann, VP Advisory Services, will join us to share some of our learnings from these projects and discuss how to go about selecting and implementing specialist software platforms to support with ESG. Whether this is your first jump into ESG – or whether you’re a seasoned professional from the days of CSR – there is plenty to uncover. 

We will take a deep-dive into some of the following aspects, considering why it is critical to ensure you get your decision right, the first time: 

• Requirements-gathering: based on your specific usage scenarios, stakeholder groups and current technology stack.
• Vendor shortlisting: there are a lot of solutions out there. We do the heavy lifting to create a shortlist of suppliers based on your key requirements.
• RFP design: how to ensure you receive proposals that fit your business requirements.  

During the 30-minute webinar, we will also take questions from our audience – so please do feel free to ask us about your specific challenges. I hope you can join us. 

Luke Buchanan 
Manager, Verdantix