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 […]
Baseload Creep: The Overnight Energy Use Quietly Eating Hospitality Margins
Close the doors, cash up, set the alarm — and the meter keeps running. Every hospitality site has a level of energy use that never switches off, even when nobody’s on the premises. That’s baseload: the electricity a building draws around the clock, night after night, regardless of whether it’s serving a single customer. Most […]
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 […]
Half-Hourly Data Explained: What Your Meter Already Knows That Your Bill Never Tells You
Your meter already knows exactly when your kitchen fridge compressor kicks in, when your ovens hit peak load, and when your empty units are quietly burning electricity overnight. Your bill just doesn’t tell you any of that. That’s about to change for good. Great Britain’s electricity market is moving to Market- Wide Half-Hourly Settlement, with […]
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 […]
The Renewal Window Trap: Why Schools Keep Ending Up on the Most Expensive Energy Rates
Most school energy contracts don’t fail because of a bad deal. They fail because of a missed date. Business managers are juggling budgets, staffing and compliance deadlines all year round. Energy contract renewal windows, often just a narrow 30 to 90 day notice period before the contract ends, are easy to lose track of in […]
SFDR, TNFD and the Data You Don’t Have: A Practical Gap Analysis for Insurers
Brussels is currently working through proposals to simplify parts of the EU’s sustainability reporting regime. That should be good news for insurers already stretched thin on compliance capacity. But simplification at the regulation level doesn’t fix the underlying problem: insurers still need decision-ready data on the private companies they underwrite, reinsure or invest in, and […]