With SMEs accounting for 90% of global businesses and 99% of the EU’s economy, their active participation in ESG disclosure and reporting has the potential to have a significant impact on the transition towards a sustainable and net zero economy.
Banks providing access to mid-financing and lending aim to ensure that they capture the sustainability profile and activities of their SME clients that seek funding. ESG disclosure enables banks to identify the most responsible businesses on their books and balance sheets, and in turn supports them with climate risk stress test scenarios and regulatory reporting requirements.
However, SMEs and banks reporting on ESG and climate risk trajectories commonly face multiple challenges linked to an ever-increasing number of new frameworks and regulatory reporting requirements, manual operational workflow processes, and thereby rising infrastructure and resource costs. Increasingly, they are looking to externalise and automate their ESG operations.
The SIX SME Sustainability Assessment Solution, powered by Greenomy, is an end-to-end data management Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that enables the global banking clients of SIX to measure the sustainability performance of their SME clients, and supports banks to assess their climate and sustainability risk trajectories linked to their loan books, and balance sheets, by facilitating the calculation of a bank’s EU’s Banking Book Taxonomy Alignment Ratio (EU BTAR).