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 […]
PCAF and the Private Company Problem: What Banks Get Wrong About Measuring Financed Emissions
Two manufacturers sit in the same lending book. One has just fitted heat pumps and cut its energy use by a third. The other still runs on ageing gas boilers and hasn’t touched its process in a decade. Look at the bank’s financed emissions numbers for both, and they’re identical. That’s not a data entry […]
120 Metrics, Seven Categories: How Public Disclosure Analysis Builds Bespoke Data for Any Framework
Ask ten underwriters, portfolio risk leads, or supply chain teams which sustainability framework they report against, and you’ll likely get ten different answers. SFDR, TNFD, ORSA, an internal risk taxonomy, a client’s own transition plan — the categories rarely match, and the underlying data almost never does either. That mismatch is the real barrier to […]
Energy Bills vs Energy Intelligence: There’s a Difference
Your energy bill tells you what you spent. It doesn’t tell you why. That distinction matters more than most SME operators realise. A quarterly invoice is a summary — a single number that arrives weeks after the energy was actually used. By the time you see it, the walk-in fridge that’s been running all night […]
SS5/25: What the Bank of England’s New Climate Rules Mean for Banks
On 3 December 2025, the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) replaced its decade-old climate guidance with something far more demanding. Supervisory Statement 5/25 gives banks just six months to complete an internal review of how they manage climate-related risk. For relationship managers and sustainability teams, that deadline changes the conversation with SME customers […]
The Hidden Cost of Switching: What Hospitality SMEs Get Wrong About Energy Renewal
A busy restaurant owner gets an email about their energy contract. It’s easy to file it away — there’s a delivery to sort, staff rotas to finish, a Friday night service to prep for. Three months later, that same owner is on a rate nearly double what they were paying before. Contract renewal isn’t complicated […]
From Regulatory Burden to Customer Opportunity: How Banks Can Turn Sustainability Data Into a Value- Add
A relationship manager sits down with an SME client for their annual review. On the list: turnover, headcount, working capital needs — and now, increasingly, questions about energy usage and emissions. For many RMs, this feels like one more compliance box to tick. But what if that same conversation became the moment a bank actually […]
Resilience as a Risk Signal: Why Operational Non- Financial Data Is the New Frontier in Commercial Underwriting
An underwriter reviewing a mid-market manufacturer has a clean set of financials. Revenue is stable, margins look healthy, the balance sheet checks out. What that underwriter doesn’t have: any real view of whether that business could withstand a supply chain shock, an energy price spike, or a single-site outage. Financial data tells you what a […]
Scope 1 and 2 for SMEs: How to Get Your Emissions Data Without Hiring a Consultant
A supplier questionnaire lands in your inbox asking for your “Scope 1 and 2 emissions.” You run a restaurant, a hotel, or a shop — not a sustainability department. Where do you even start? This question is showing up more often, and not by accident. Larger customers, lenders and franchise partners are all under growing […]
Ask a bank how confident it is in the emissions data behind its SME loan book, and the honest answer is usually “not very.” Most of that data still comes from surveys — chased, half-completed, and quietly out of date within a year.
Renewal season for commercial insurers usually means the same conversation on repeat: chasing a policyholder for information that either never arrives, or arrives in a format nobody can compare to last year’s file. According to the Association of British Insurers, insurers are increasingly expected to factor climate and sustainability-related resilience into commercial underwriting and portfolio […]