Philippine Dealing System Holdings Corp. (PDS Group) has sealed a partnership with Asia’s leading Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data and technology solutions company, STACS.
The partnership will allow the PDS Group to utilize STACS’s ESGpedia platform to support corporate sustainability and ESG reporting for businesses and issuers in the Philippines.
This is part of the Sustainable Finance Institute Asia (SFIA) pilot initiative to address ESG data and disclosure gaps in ASEAN markets.
As the largest ESG data registry in Asia with use cases across various sectors, ESGpedia has been selected as one of the technology platform partners for the SFIA Single AccessPoint for ESG Data (SAFE) Initiative Pilot.
It aims to bring together and empower key industry participants across ASEAN through credible, comprehensive, and consistent ESG data reporting.
Through the partnership, PDS Group is promoting ESGpedia for use, initially by its community of listed issuers, and then for all other Philippine companies, to facilitate their ESG data reporting journey expected to become a set of regular corporate disclosures.
ESGpedia provides a digital platform which simplifies various ESG standards and frameworks, providing an easy and guided sustainability journey.
It also includes digital tools to automatically convert operational data like fuel, refrigerant, and electricity consumption to GHG emissions under the standard GHG Protocol, localized to the Philippines, allowing companies to gain insights of their carbon footprint.
ESGpedia has also partnered with the ESCAP Sustainable Business Network (ESBN) Asia- Pacific Green Deal Program. Through this, participants will also be eligible to achieve a Green, Silver or Gold Green Deal Badge upon completion of their company ESG profile on ESGpedia.
This profile would include data submitted through disclosures and enhanced by aggregated data from public sources. This serves as an incentive program to allow awardees to showcase to customers, investors, and financers their commitment to sustainability.
The cross-border partnership was unveiled in Manila on Sept. 11, 2023, with the attendance of companies in the country (corporations and financial institutions), the United Nations Global Compact Philippines, the Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
This follows the successful launch of ESGpedia in Vietnam with Bamboo Capital Group (also part of the SFIA SAFE Initiative), earlier in August.
“The first step to corporate sustainability is awareness and an understanding of the company’s own ESG standing,” said PDEx President and CEO Antonino Nakpil.
He added that, “to this end we are delighted to support the Sustainable Finance Institute Asia (SFIA) Single Accesspoint for ESG Data (SAFE) Initiative.
Powered by our partner STACS’s ESGpedia, SAFE will facilitate Philippine businesses’ access to credible, consistent, and comprehensive ESG data, generation of insights into their GHG emissions, and streamline their corporate sustainability and ESG reporting.”
As the recipient of the corporate disclosures of its community of issuers, the PDS Group is well positioned as a nexus for the new reporting regimes for corporate ESG data.
“By promoting this digital portal for this information, the Group looks to help empower its community, and spreading to a wider range of Philippine corporations achieve the national goals as well as the ASEAN goals toward Net Zero emissions,” said Nakpil.
STACS Managing Director Benjamin Soh said: “Countries across Asia are transiting towards mandatory ESG disclosures. To facilitate likely to be required disclosures for businesses in the Philippines, we are delighted that ESGpedia is partnering with PDS Group as part of the ASEAN Single Accesspoint for ESG Data (SAFE) initiative, to promote ESGpedia for use by its community of listed issuers and all other Philippine companies.”
“These companies will benefit from a free and guided program on ESGpedia to kickstart their ESG data reporting and decarbonisation journey. Through a community-centric approach, we look forward to shaping the future of the ESG data landscape and empowering ASEAN nations in their mandatory ESG reporting and sustainability journey,” he noted.
Covering over five million sustainability data points, ESGpedia empowers financial institutions and companies to achieve strategic sustainability goals, by providing harmonized and standardized asset-level ESG data, and solutions to enable sustainable finance and suppliers sustainability monitoring.
Through AI-powered aggregation and harmonization, ESGpedia combines public ESG data with primary disclosure data, collected directly through the platform.