ESG data: a shared decision-making asset
Before co-founding Ascend, Sabine led Vigeo Eiris, a non-financial rating agency acquired by Moody's in 2019. From both sides—the company and the agency—she saw the cost of the proliferation of ESG questionnaires that, ultimately, all ask for the same thing. In this new episode of the Pourquoi Harnest series, she explains why the value of ESG data lies not just in its quality, but in the company's ability to share it with its ecosystem without losing control over it.
Temps de lecture estimé : X min
Before co-founding Ascend, I led Vigeo Eiris, an agency for ESG rating founded by Nicole Notat and acquired by Moody's in April 2019. The group quickly invested significant resources there, strengthening a diversified ESG offering on a global scale.
Our goal was to distribute the collected data worldwide, making it accessible to the various financial and economic systems that are themselves committed to financing the transformation of business models currently shifting due to environmental, social, and governance issues.
The purpose of our ESG rating agency was to provide investors and issuers with high-quality ESG data that was contextualized, analyzed, and supportive of various offerings, all of which aimed to assess a company's value to better finance its development (whether through markets or financial products like green bonds or loans, for example).
What follows is the result of my experience within this rapidly changing system. Vigeo Eiris, and later Moody's ESG, developed some of the questionnaires that companies receive when they are listed or when they seek financing from authorized financial institutions following an impact investment strategy.
I have seen, from both sides—the company and the agency—the cost of responding to so many different questionnaire formats just to say essentially the same thing about one's risks and resilience, most often without feeling any sense of satisfaction regarding the results obtained.
During those years, and later while advising executive leaders and boards of directors, I too often observed the same imbalance: a very precise mastery of financial data, but a still partial vision of non-financial factors, even though they effectively determine a company's resilience and its capacity for long-term sustainability.
Thus, while ESG data often exists, even regarding the topics at the top of executives' agendas, it remains too often scattered, frozen in reports, insufficiently integrated into decision-making, and, above all, undervalued in its consequences for strategy and the company's assets.
It was these experiences and deep-seated intuitions that led me to co-found Ascend with Patrice Hiddinga and Fabien Herelle to develop a platform addressing the challenge of anextra-financial ERP.
The goal: to provide companies with a structure that benefits their decision-making assets, which they can share with financial and non-financial partners alike, without having to rebuild it for each stakeholder.
Context creates value
ESG data gains value when it maintains, or even strengthens, the connections between data points, as well as with financial data, which provides meaning and reliability. An isolated data point answers a question; data connected to its context allows you to understand a situation. Fabien explained this previously regarding a company's decision-making assets. This distinction allows the same data to be used by an executive committee, an operations team, an investor, or an insurer: each views a different representation, yet the underlying data remains the same. Context simply allows for a reading tailored to each user's needs, or even links it to other financial elements, which are essential for validating investment logic and ROI, even when those returns can only be realized in the long term.
Thus, ESG data governance is no longer limited to ensuring their quality. It also enables their reuse across multiple processes, their sharing among stakeholders, and their long-term utilization for the benefit of the company and its ecosystem. The sustainability management consists precisely of understanding these relationships rather than simply accumulating information, both within the legal entity AND its ecosystem, extending beyond the company itself.
Decision-making assets extend beyond company boundaries
For a long time, every organization from which a company sought financial commitment or performance recognition created its own questionnaire: banks, investors, insurers, major clients, and rating agencies. Yet, each one requests very similar information—often already available within the company—but in different formats or using different metrics. In practice, teams spent a significant portion of their time reformatting existing data rather than generating new insights or working systemically.
This fragmentation now represents a very real cost for companies; worse, it slows down exchanges and limits the reuse of ESG data, which, moreover, is far too often limited to reporting purposes.
My analysis is that value no longer resides solely in the data a company possesses; it also lies in its ability to share that data in a controlled manner with its entire ecosystem.
Share without losing control
Understanding and realizing that there is a highly valuable non-financial decision-making heritage changes the historical logic applied to non-financial reporting.
From now on, data is described once, associated with its definition, context, history, and relationships with indicators, risks, policies, or action plans.
Each stakeholder can then access a report tailored to their needs, without compromising the shared foundation they rely on.
However, like any asset, data will evolve with deployed projects, external company events, and so on.
What changes is the systemic and interactive approach taken by leaders, in a space where value comes from sharing situational information to build a set ofintangible assets, whether at the company level, or for a territory, populations, one or more sectors, etc. This dynamic corresponds in some ways to the construction of these Common Goods or Fundamental Goals described by Professor Marie-Anne Frison-Roche as early as 2016.
Therefore, the company retains control over its data: it decides which information to share, with which partners, for what purposes, and at what time. It takes its own risks, assumes its responsibilities, and builds an intangible asset valuable, communicable, and robust.
The ability to share reliable information while maintaining control is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage. How can you leverage it?
A new milestone for ESG data
Since the 19th century, companies have learned how to manage their financial and industrial assets, as well as their intellectual property.
Due to the seismic shifts caused by climate and migration crises, political and geostrategic instability, the rise of AI, the destabilization of democratic models, and identity-based and inter-religious conflicts, ESG data is undergoing rapid evolution. Identifying and recognizing its value no longer depends solely on naming it, imposing it on economic and financial players, or even its quality; it now depends on the ability to understand it within a permanently disrupted context, to reuse it to support and give meaning to action plans designed to manage the present and build a sustainable future, and, above all, to share it in a controlled manner with the entire ecosystem so that it becomes central to decision-making.
As ESG data exchanges multiply and shape the recognition of performance and investments, this capability is becoming a factor of trust between companies and their partners, investors, banks, and insurers. Trust is no longer based solely on exchanged documents, but on the quality of the non-financial decision-making assets that make medium- and long-term relationships and commitments possible, even when short-term results are unattainable or insufficient.
It is this conviction that guides the Ascend team in the design of Harnest, and especially in its evolution to meet the needs of companies and investors.
That is why the platform was not primarily designed to produce ESG reporting or comply with the CSRD. That is why it is structured as a project, because the essential goal for the company is to deliver action plans that are continuously evaluated through indicators that enable management, communication, and transparency between stakeholders (both humans and AI agents), at a time when the need for qualified visibility is essential for carrying out the deep-seated restructuring that various economic and financial players are currently undertaking.
Yes, our platform was primarily designed to enable companies to build a (new) non-financial decision-making asset base that is sustainable, capable of supporting sustainability management, providing meaning for decisions requiring extraordinary funding, and ultimately sharing reliable information within ecosystems that increasingly operate in "packs."
In short, all these systemic elements are necessary to create the conditions for tangible trust among the relevant stakeholders. Through this work, it is up to them, in turn, to contribute to building this new performance and the results to be achieved, because it is consistent with their purpose, as well as the interests of the individuals and organizations they represent.