European Financial Congress had its another edition in Sopot on 6-8 June 2022. We participated in the conference with the subject of ESG reporting, which should already be a key factor of strategy in medium and big enterprises in Poland.
The discussion panel ‘Not Only E-Role of Financial Institutions in Building Awareness of Reporting ESG in Relations with Business Partners’ was attended by Marcin Bielecki — Cloud & AI Business Unit Leader (Poland and Baltics) at IBM; Marcin Eckert — Vice-President of the Management Board, responsible for supervising corporate banking and administration in PKO Bank Polski; Tomasz Gasiński — Director of Sustainable Development Team at Deloitte, Advisory Leader on Climate Change and ESG Risks; Krzysztof Kowal — Vice-President of Incube CPM, Co-Founder of Qalcwise.com; and Łukasz Olszewski, General Director for Poland and Director of Business Development in Central and Eastern Europe, Turkey, Greece and Ukraine at S&P Global Ratings.
ESG Reporting in Practice
ESG standards, the need to implement them and proper ESG reporting are transforming business throughout the world. Do financial institutions play any particular role in this transformation? Their relation with business clients is based on trust which very often takes years to establish. Does it mean that those are the financial institutions that are responsible for supporting clients in adapting to the standards?
– Banks ask businesses whether they have ESG strategy or decarbonization strategy because they know that in 3–5 years big enterprises or medium enterprises aspiring to become big enterprises will not be able to develop without such strategies — admitted expert from Deloitte. That is true, even now companies are verified against reporting ESG and many of the big players on the market want to cooperate only with those businesses which run and report sustainability activities.
Role of Technological Companies in ESG Reporting
What digital solutions are necessary for the business to implement and report ESG standards and who should deliver such solutions? It turns out that those solutions are already available and in spite of appearances they can be easily implemented within the company. Especially when such company is already active in the area of Corporate Performance Management and holds relevant software, e.g. IBM Planning Analytics (TM1). Implementing the tool for ESG reporting would be then a relatively quick process.
The entire summary of the discussion panel, which addressed also other aspects than ESG reporting, is available here and at www.forsal.pl