Benjamin Soh, Founder and Managing Director at STACS
Singapore-based STACS is the company behind ESGpedia, a series of tools that enabled corporates and SMEs to perform a digitalised and simplified self-assement to kickstart their sustainability journey. It has supported hundreds of companies across Asia Pacific to help achieve their sustainability goals and has expanded across several Southeast Asian (SEA) market, including Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
Today, the ESG data and tech solutions company launched upgrades to the ESGpedia platform that will allow businesses and financial institutions to comply with ESG regulatory requirements across Europe and Asia–which continues to get increasingly stricter.
Benjamin Soh, Founder and Managing Director at STACS, said in a press statement, “ASEAN companies are facing increasing mandatory ESG requirements, which are extending to large non-listed companies and SMEs. This is where understanding your current ESG profile and leveraging technologies like Artificial Intelligence come in place to help companies ensure compliance towards the evolving ESG regulations landscape across Europe and Asia.”
The company is doing this through two approaches:
ESGpedia Nexus
According to STACS, this approach enables companies of various ESG maturities to achieve their end-to-end business needs and full readiness through active engagement and its marketplace of sustainability solutions.
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“It offers digital tools that automatically convert operational data like fuel, refrigerant, and electricity consumption to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under the standard GHG Protocol, localised to all Asia Pacific countries. To help companies take positive actions towards ESG excellence, ESGpedia Nexus provides a marketplace where companies can amplify their ESG profile, and sell or procure ESG services.”
ESGpedia Intelligence
The tool aims to empower banks, investors, insurers, and corporates to overcome data fragmentation and provide a complete picture with aggregated ESG data across countries and sectors via AI-based harmonisation of unstructured ESG data.
“Since the launch of ESGpedia version 2.0 in May earlier this year with five million sustainability data points, the platform has since strengthened its AI-capabilities in aggregating, harmonising, and standardising ESG data (to even smart extraction of ESG metrices from documents) and enhanced its data coverage – it now includes 300,000+ companies’ sustainability data, of which 115,000+ company profiles have full corporate data overlaid and standardised,” STACS says.
“As a key development, the platform now offers Taxonomy Regulatory Mapping which provides digital automation to transform portfolio data to regulatory needs like ESRS, Environmental Risk Questionnaire (ERQ) in Singapore, Climate Change and Principle-based Taxonomy (CCPT) Due Diligence in Malaysia, Philippines SEC Sustainability Reporting Form (SuRe), and more.”
The updates are introduced with the background of the latest regulations to be introduced in the European Union on ESG.
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STACS explained that starting from 2024, both European Union (EU) companies and non-EU companies will be directly in scope under the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). This update will significantly impact companies based in Asia Pacific as it includes the companies’ supply chain which 90 per cent is represented by SMEs in Asia.
In addition to that, STACS also highlights that various Asia markets have also implemented mandatory regulatory reporting to enhance the adoption of global sustainability and ESG standards. This includes the International Financial Reporting Standards’ (IFRS) inaugural ISSB standard, with many disclosure requirements extending to large non-listed companies and SMEs.
STACS hopes that with the tools, they can help tackle the problem of the lack of ESG data on these companies’ supply chains.
Examples of companies that have used the ESGpedia platform is OCBC. Through data digitally collected on ESGpedia via the ESBN Asia-Pacific Green Deal digital assessment and independently verified by Bureau Veritas, OCBC extended a Sustainability Linked Loan (SLL) to a global textile and apparel manufacturer Ghim Li.
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