A risk team sends out a sustainability questionnaire to a thousand SME clients. Weeks
later, the responses trickle in — a fraction of the list, with answers that don’t line up
from one business to the next.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s the standard outcome of survey-based data collection, and it’s
quietly undermining how insurers and corporates assess SME risk and resilience.
The problem isn’t that businesses won’t engage. It’s that surveys were never built to
deliver consistent, comparable data at scale.
Why Survey Response Rates Collapse at SME Scale
Large corporates have compliance teams who treat sustainability questionnaires as
part of the job. SMEs don’t.
For a small or mid-sized business, a long survey competes directly with the day-to-day
demands of running the company:
• No dedicated resource to interpret or complete detailed questionnaires
• Limited time to chase internal data across operations, finance and supply chain
• Uncertainty about what’s actually being asked, especially with technical
terminology
• No clear incentive to prioritise the survey over immediate operational pressures
The result is low response rates — and the businesses that don’t respond aren’t a
random sample. They tend to be exactly the SMEs that risk teams most need visibility
into.
Inconsistent Answers Are Just as Big a Problem as No Answers
Even when SMEs do respond, the data quality varies significantly. One business might
interpret a question generously; another might answer conservatively for the same
underlying risk profile.
This isn’t because SMEs are being evasive. Most do hold relevant operational and
resilience information — it’s simply fragmented across systems, not standardised in a
way that produces comparable answers across a portfolio. The Bank of England has
made a similar point about climate-related financial risk more broadly, noting that the
underlying data is often dispersed and inconsistently structured across firms.
What This Means for Risk and Underwriting Teams
Surveys built on self-reported, inconsistent inputs make it harder to benchmark risk
across a book of business. Two SMEs with identical real-world exposure can end up
with very different risk profiles, simply because of how each one filled in a form.
How TDH Data Side Steps the Participation Problem
TDH data is built without relying on SME participation as the starting point. Public
disclosures, sustainability reports, financial filings and policy documents are analysed
directly — structured by TDH’s Public Disclosure Analysis, into consistent, comparable
risk and resilience indicators across a portfolio.
No survey to chase. No inconsistent self-reporting. Just structured data, built from
what’s already publicly available, applied consistently across every SME in scope.
What This Means for Insurers and Corporates
Risk and resilience visibility shouldn’t depend on whether an SME has time to fill in a
form. Public disclosure analysis gives underwriting and risk teams a consistent
baseline across the whole portfolio — including the businesses that would never have
responded to a survey in the first place.
See the Data Behind Your SME Book
Talk to our team about how TDH’s public disclosure analysis can give your risk and
underwriting teams consistent SME visibility, without relying on response rates.
