WNS Global Services, BPM company based in London, has taken a step further to declare that it is now entering into a strategic partnership with Uniqus Consultech. This one is one of the world’s leading consulting companies from Mumbai and focuses on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting. ESG reporting has become the next big domain as more stringent regulations need to be followed, providing a single-window solution to businesses for taking care of their sustainability and financial accounting needs.
The combination of WNS and Uniqus services creates an impressive package to cover the steadily rising needs of companies who are not only looking towards making sustainability in business practices but also monitoring financial transparency. Combining the finance expertise and business process management knowledge of WNS with ESG knowledge, the ability to provide a better understanding of corporations to their clients is a key part of what the companies want to offer to their customers by helping them chart the complex landscape of ESG regulations and standards. Such partnership will most likely ensure easier adherence to the increase in ESG disclosure requests by businesses while at the same time ensuring proper and compliant financial reporting.
ESG Reporting: The Growing Necessity
ESG reporting is now an imperative for companies globally. Increased demand from investors, regulators, and stakeholders for greater transparency regarding sustainability practices and their eventual long-term outcome on the environment and society are being called for. Consequently, companies must therefore integrate sustainability metrics in concurrence with their more traditional financial disclosures.
This can prove to be very resource-intensive for companies that have no infrastructure or expertise in place to manage and report ESG data. Companies are now faced with an ever-increasing number of ESG frameworks, standards, and regulations on the back of which they need to ensure their financial reporting is right and compliant with local and international accounting standards.
This is where the linkup between WNS and Uniqus enters. Both companies are keen to address an integrated solution for businesses that focuses on the sustainability dimension coupled with the concurrent financial reporting requirement, thus allowing companies to reduce their processes and focus on core business objectives.
E-launch of ESG UniVerse Platform
Between these two entities WNS and Uniqus, they have developed a new platform called ESG UniVerse. It is an integrated solution that satisfies the ESG reporting, accounting, and sustainability requirement for companies. The unified platform is a combined financial and non-financial solution that allows companies to monitor their traditional financial indicators in tandem with sustainability metrics.
The platform is aimed at streamlining organization’s ESG reporting process, reducing administrative burdens from multiple systems, and helping ensure its disclosures meet growing expectations from investors, regulators, and other stakeholders. This means that ESG UniVerse allows companies to monitor better their progress toward the fulfillment of their pursuit of sustainability goals, but also in being aligned with industrial standards and best practices in their reporting.
In addition to those, the platform will feature risk management, data consolidation, and long-term sustainability planning for businesses. This is helpful for better decision-making while remaining responsive to the newly developing risks of ESG.
Benefits of WNS-Uniqus Partnership
The WNS-Uniqus alliance offers a range of significant value propositions for companies interested in exploiting ESG reporting and financial accounting enhancement
The combined capabilities of WNS and Uniqus mean that the clients will have a holistic solution to provide ESG report integration into financial accounting. This integrates the business’s reporting process, avoiding duplication while ensuring data accuracy and consistency.
Improved Compliance: As ESG reporting frameworks and regulations are constantly changing, with new demands being made available frequently, the companies are required to ensure that their disclosures remain compliant with both the existing and developing requirements. The partnership will allow the clients to obtain updated knowledge of the standards and regulations on ESG, thus helping them to keep compliance and save from a number of potential penalties.
Improvement in Data Management Managing the geographically spread ESG and financial data of companies is complex; the platform, therefore, allows businesses to aggregate their data to gain a clearer view of how they are performing on their sustainability indicator compared to their overall financial health.
Risk Mitigation: ESG risk is growing in prominence, and companies must ensure that they are proactively managing their risks well to protect and maintain their long-term sustainability. The WNS-Uniqus partnership brings to clients tools and insights that can help them better identify, assess, and manage ESG risks for resilience in this more volatile business environment.
Sector expertise: The partnership between WNS and Uniqus is especially useful for companies operating in industries at a more heightened level of ESG scrutiny, namely energy, manufacturing, and financial services. It will provide sector-specific expertise that will help companies address some specific issues they are experiencing while dealing with ESG and financial reporting.
Overcoming the Challenges of ESG Reporting
While ESG reporting has now become a standard element of good corporate governance, it is extremely challenging for many companies, especially those that are small and resource-constrained or have no expertise whatsoever in the sustainability front. Companies need to report a wide range of metrics-they have to report a wide array of non-financial metrics, including their environmental impact, social responsibility initiatives, and governance practices. Such data gathering and analysis require time, and most of them face severe challenges in ensuring that their disclosures are accurate and complete.
There is no well-established standard of ESG reporting framework in place. Thus, companies face various states and industries, which would create different demands on them. This would increase the complexity and create confusion and inconsistencies in reporting, which again would compromise the credibility of a company in its sustainability efforts.
An alliance of this sort between WNS and Uniqus works to address this problem by offering simple integrated solutions on ESG and financial reporting for a business. Using the ESG UniVerse platform is a means of streamlining the complexities with which reporting processes are associated with companies and thereby enhancing the quality of their disclosures and portrayal of commitment towards sustainability among investors and stakeholders.
Conclusion
As this new trend in ESG reporting spreads around the world, companies are looking for answers that will enable them to meet the mounting levels of demands for greater transparency and accountability. Therefore, an example of a very great step toward the simplification of ESG reporting is well represented in WNS’s partnership with Uniqus, with the assurance that companies could bring their sustainability and financial goals together.
Through this unified platform, ESG UniVerse, WNS and Uniqus assist companies in handling ESG data, ensuring that they remain aligned with the changing regime of regulations, and thus, to their commitment towards sustainability. With increasing companies adopting ESG reporting, the partnership between WNS and Uniqus is geared to assist companies wade through this new paradigm.
Source: WNS