Climate Data Quality Is Becoming a Capital Question: What Prudential Expectations Mean for SME Portfolios
In December 2025, the Prudential Regulation Authority raised the bar. Supervisory Statement SS5/25 moved climate risk out of the “awareness” phase and into core financial workflows: governance, credit underwriting, capital planning, provisioning. Building on SS3/19, the PRA has introduced SS5/25, establishing the expectation for firms to integrate climate risk into core financial workflows using climate […]
Data Lineage and Auditability: Why Regulated Firms Need to Know Where Every Metric Came From
Ask an underwriter where a counterparty’s flood exposure figure came from, and most can answer. Ask where its sustainability score came from, and the trail often goes cold somewhere between a spreadsheet and a survey response from two years ago. That gap is about to become a live assurance problem, not a background one. ISSA […]
Greenwashing Risk in SME Green Lending: How Banks End Up Exposed by Someone Else’s Numbers
By June 2026, every UK bank must show the PRA a credible gap analysis against SS5/25, the supervisory statement that now treats climate risk as core prudential risk. For banks with sustainability-linked loans across their SME book, the hardest gap to close isn’t governance. It’s the emissions number sitting behind the loan. Risk teams reviewing […]
The Data Handshake at Renewal: What Brokers and Underwriters Should Be Asking Commercial Clients
Is a business quietly moving through its renewal season with insurers who can’t actually see the risk they’re pricing? According to Aon’s UK insurance market insights, underwriters are now placing far greater weight on financial resilience, governance quality and ESG disclosures during primary underwriting, and are pulling back from risks where transparency is weaker. The […]
The Onboarding Questionnaire Is Dead: Rethinking Supplier Due Diligence for 2027
A forced-labour screen that was accurate at onboarding can be worthless six months later if the supplier quietly changes subcontractors. A deforestation attestation can become indefensible if the underlying coordinates were never refreshed. Supplier due diligence has spent a decade built around a single moment: onboarding. The questionnaire goes out, the supplier responds, the file […]
Sustainability-Linked Loans for SMEs: Can the KPIs Actually Be Trusted?
Sustainability-linked loans were meant to be the bridge between good intentions and hard numbers. Hit your target, your margin drops. Miss it, your margin rises. Simple, in theory. In practice, banks are increasingly asking a harder question: what happens when the KPI itself can’t be trusted? That question has moved from academic to operational. According […]
Same Framework, Different Weighting: Why 120 Metrics Mean Different Things Across Sectors
Ask an underwriter to compare a manufacturer’s sustainability score with a software company’s, and the instinct is to line the numbers up side by side. That instinct is the problem. The same disclosure topic simply doesn’t carry the same weight everywhere. Water use matters enormously for a beverage producer and barely registers for a professional […]
What Relationship Managers Actually Need: Making Climate Data Usable at the Point of Lending
Ask a relationship manager when they last used a climate risk dashboard, and most will tell you: never. Not because they don’t care, but because the data lives somewhere else entirely. It sits in a sustainability team’s spreadsheet, or a PDF report commissioned once a year. By the time it might matter to a credit […]
Estimates Versus Evidence: What Changes in a Risk Model When Modelled Data Is Replaced With Reported Data
Ask an underwriter how confident they are in a corporate risk score, and most will hedge. Not because the model is wrong, but because they know how much of it is inferred rather than confirmed. That distinction matters more this year than ever. EIOPA’s own climate risk commentary this April put it plainly: better data […]
Transition Plans Without Transition Data: Why Bank Net Zero Roadmaps Keep Slipping
Every major UK bank now has a transition plan. Glossy, board-approved, publicly disclosed. But ask the same bank for portfolio-level transition data on its SME lending book, and the confidence disappears fast. That gap just got harder to hide. Following the Prudential Regulation Authority’s SS5/25, UK banks were required to complete an internal gap analysis […]