Dun & Bradstreet India launches ESG Intelligence, aims to help organisations turn ESG-compliant

Dun & Bradstreet India on Tuesday launched a suite of solutions called D&B ESG Intelligence, the company stated in a press release.

It has been launched to help organisations become ESG-compliant by conducting self-assessments as well as accessing third-party ESG reports on suppliers, vendors and other supply chain partners.

“Across the globe, ESG has become a mainstay of conversation in corporate boardrooms and, more importantly, in the allocation of capital. According to a Dun & Bradstreet survey highlighting top compliance and procurement challenges, 51% respondents said they needed more data to verify entities and 43% said it is difficult to identify the application of ESG guidelines when carrying out due diligence on a customer. Inefficient data usage and management are at the core of such challenges,” said Avinash Gupta, Managing Director and CEO, Dun & Bradstreet India.

Dun & Bradstreet India’s ESG Intelligence offers the following features:

• ESG Self-Assessment for companies to proactively update their ESG information
• ESG Report which is a comprehensive documentation of an organisation’s ESG performance
• Risk Analytics platform to upload, interact with and request data to check identify vulnerabilities in supply chains
• ESG Registered Solutions, which will offer a seal of ESG credibility that can be displayed on a company’s website

The move can also be attributed to the fact that the Securities and Exchange Board of India has now mandated the top 1,000 businesses by market capitalization to file a Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR), along with their annual filings to the stock exchanges, starting with the FY 2023 financial reporting.

Many Indian companies are still dependent on manual processes to collect internal ESG data such as water consumption, carbon emissions, workforce demographics, etc., and therefore these data resources are often housed across databases in different formats.

“Digitizing these processes and products will save time and money, expediting the speed of decision making. A 360-degree ESG intelligence solution can improve the structuring of data, offer a clear view of all business relationships and enable companies to align their ESG data to meet their ESG goals. The structured data will also help build a universal ESG framework, which all stakeholders will find beneficial,” added Gupta while talking about the importance of ESG intelligence