Industry and finance: towards an extra-financial data infrastructure

Extra-financial data describes the robustness of the company

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Treating extra-financial data as a reporting subject is a fundamental error. We work a lot with BITD players, and this shows how unsuitable this approach is for industrial companies.

Extra-financial data makes it possible to describe the way in which a company operates, resists and adapts in its environment.

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Analyzing it is equivalent to qualifying:

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Critical Dependencies and Exhibitions

• Critical dependencies (suppliers, materials, technologies),
• Geopolitical exhibitions,

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Vulnerabilities and resilience capacities

• Operational Vulnerabilities
• security and continuity devices.

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This information describes the real strength of the business.

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Data that is still difficult to use

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This information requires a structured data model to be used with confidence.

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However, in many companies, this data is still mostly managed in Excel files, stored in non-sovereign environments and without a stable structure over time.

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This results in a lack of a common data model, a duplication of information, a loss of traceability and an inability to reconstruct the history of decisions.

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Applying finance standards to extra-financial matters

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A financial system is based on:

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• a unique database,
• Explicit Management Rules
• and complete traceability.

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This level of requirement now applies to extra-financial data. Because without this structure, data becomes:

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• unreliable,
• Hard to share,
• Expensive to produce,
• Unusable for critical uses such as financing or insurance.

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In BITD, an issue directly linked to financing

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In BITD, this lag becomes structuring.

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The work carried out by Sabine Lochmann within the Eurodefense-France working group shows that the central challenge lies in the readability of companies for financial actors: the information exists, but it is presented in a fragmented manner and remains difficult to interpret in a financing logic.

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Key information:

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• positioning in the value chain,
• critical dependencies,
• risk concentration,
• Resilience Capacity

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Financing industrial sovereignty means making this data usable.

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This is based on an infrastructure capable of defining a stable data model, of managing access rights, of ensuring the traceability of changes, of guaranteeing the sovereignty of the hosting and of exposing the data without duplicating it.