Singapore, November 2024: Ant International, Singapore-based global digital payments and financial services company is announcing the MSME Sustainability Impact Scorecard (MSME S-Card), a new tool it has designed to help Asia’s MSMEs better monitor and enhance their sustainability activities. This digital scorecard helps MSMEs measure and report their Environmental, Social, and Governance metrics in an efficient manner, thus making these small and medium-sized enterprises more sustainable and integrating ESG goals into their business operations.
The MSME S-Card is part of Ant International’s Programme Sirius-the company has developed a system that is highly relevant in today’s context by satisfying a critical need of MSMEs: accessibility to manageable, cost-effective solutions that help counter traditional barriers to sustainability. Thus, for most MSMEs, this constraint of limited resources and lack of expertise makes it difficult for them to undertake ESG practices. This means they are left out of opportunities that align with global sustainability standards. With this, the MSME S-Card is addressing this gap through a scalable solution tailored to the needs of small businesses in Asia.
Addressing Sustainability Challenges for MSMEs in Asia
MSMEs are the backbone of Asia’s economy; however, many times they do not have the resources to carry out sustainability practices, as its implementation has much higher costs and complexities involved. MSME S-Card aims to help facilitate sustainability tracking and support for these businesses around key areas, namely environmental impact, social responsibility, and governance.
This scorecard enables MSMEs to easily acquire, verify, and track ESG data through digital means. While collecting verifiable ESG data, businesses gain an understanding of their environmental and social footprints and, therefore, will act wisely to make improvements based on adopted standards. A collaboration that falls under Programme Sirius, the MSME S-Card resorts to digital means to make ESG tracking accessible and user-friendly. This helps small businesses improve their transparency and strive for sustainable growth.
A Collaboration Under Programme Sirius
The S-Card is one of the first programmes launched as part of Ant International’s Programme Sirius, a wide partnership developed to enhance the support of sustainability for MSMEs across Asia. Participants include Gprnt, leader in the ESG data platform in Singapore, and 13 financial technology companies, including those that operate within the Asia-Pacific region, that together will offer the tools that the Asia-Pacific region’s MSMEs need in their sustainability journey.
Programme Sirius will focus on ESG. Its objective is aligned with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which guides the scorecard’s structure and criteria. “The programme shall make the integration of ESG possible for MSMEs by attending to their concerns on accessible financing, expertise, and ESG resources.”.
A successful collaboration with Gprnt by Ant International laid the foundation for the MSME S-Card. Gprnt’s ESG data technology can gather granular, comparable, and verifiable data and, hence, can easily track the sustainability metrics of MSMEs and measure its progress over time. This kind of technological support is essentially required for a business that may lack the structure or knowledge to track the ESG factors independently.
Customized Sustainability Solutions for Local Markets
This calls for tailoring by the partners of Ant International of the scorecard for local markets in Asia. As one example of this, GCash has customized the MSME S-Card especially for the Philippine market, fitting this scorecard with ESG indicators that are relevant to the local setting. Such adaptability becomes necessary in retaining the efficacy as well as significance of the scorecard to MSMEs mostly present in the region with different regulatory and economic conditions.
With these market-specific fine-tuning, Ant International and its partners strive to promote ESG practices pertinent to each market’s local reality. Customization also addresses unique sustainability challenges and priorities of regions such that MSMEs can join the global sustainability movement within local standards and best practices.
Remove Barriers on ESG for MSMEs
The MSME S-Card helps to surmount the general barriers to adoption of ESG among small business enterprises, including cost, lack of knowledge, and resource. By making tracking ESG easier, the scorecard allows businesses to have a better understanding of their current level of sustainability performance and make improvements over time without requiring tremendous budgets or advanced levels of expertise.
The MSME S-Card promotes environmental friendliness in the micro and small enterprises sector by reducing up-front costs and facilitating actionable insight in conformity with what governments expect and the ever-changing whims of consumers. For the MSMEs, the benefits from that edge would be better access to green financing options besides a brand reputation that is increasingly important in a market where rewards go to those corporations that sell products and provide services without causing harm to the earth.
Again, the digital MSME S-Card encourages sustainability efforts with minimal human intervention by requiring only very low levels. Of course, this is particularly of significance for smaller enterprises, where the requests placed upon them in the traditional ESG tracking process can be quite proscriptive on one’s available resources or time.
Then, MSMEs gain access to the tools meant to improve their ESG practices, while open access to green financing and other sustainability-related financial opportunities. This existing ability of MSMEs to document and demonstrate adherence to the framework of ESG factors could further differentiate them in a world where more financial institutions are considering ESG as part of the lending criteria.
In addition to the advantages of the MSME S-Card, MSMEs are expected to enhance public image. Since most consumers prefer companies that practice transparency and responsibility, small businesses in Asia may construct a platform in which customer loyalty is improved and sustainable brands can be directed towards receptive audiences.
Potential Development of MSME Sustainability in Asia
With MSME S-Card, the launch marks an important milestone toward sustainability in small businesses across Asia. And now, it has become possible for Ant International and its partners to have complete control over ESG tracking with its manageable and affordable cost so that their quest for change in the approach taken by MSMEs to achieve environmental and social responsibility can be made more enduring. In this general vision, the partnership aims to empower small businesses to be part of a greater global movement toward sustainability and thereby contribute toward a commonly shared vision for economic growth that does not sacrifice environmental and social integrity.
This opens sustainability at the global level for MSMEs, but will also cultivate businesses that hold ESG close, thus furthering the interests of local economies. At this scale, the scale of positive environmental impact will grow as all these more MSMEs use the scorecard over time will see more robust local communities and a sustainable business ecosystem generally.
Source: Ant International