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Over the last five years, the dominant regulatory trend in global compliance has been the spread of legislation which mandates companies to carry out Human Rights and ESG Due Diligence (HRDD) on third parties and suppliers. This has significant implications for any company operating in a jurisdiction with HRDD regulations–or whose third parties and suppliers operate there. In the latest blog in our Third Party Risk Series, we explain why responding to this trend should be a priority for your company–and how LexisNexis can help.
The most obvious reason why firms should pay attention to ESG regulations is that the trend has already made a major change to the global regulatory framework, and appears to be here to stay. Some of the world’s largest economies now require companies to assess their third parties and suppliers for ESG risks. For example:
There has also been a trend towards regulators requiring financial companies to make disclosures about their efforts to improve their ESG record. For example:
Moreover, the trend towards human rights and ESG regulation does not seem to be slowing down. More and more countries have proposed, or are considering, legislation and regulation which mandates companies to address human rights and ESG issues. For example:
HRDD legislation is so consequential for firms it is likely to change the way they approach compliance and due diligence. Traditionally, a typical due diligence process sought to rule out any legal or financial issues in a third party. Now, this process needs to be expanded so that compliance officers can accurately assess a firm’s ESG record too.
But improving your firm’s understanding of its third parties’ human rights and ESG records is not simply about avoiding regulatory attention. Demonstrating that your company has effective oversight of all its third parties and suppliers, and is able to root out any suspicion of ESG failures and take action, has also been proven to drive commercial success. This is because growing numbers of customers, employees and investors want to buy from, work for and invest in firms with a positive effect on society. This trend is predicted to continue because, as a recent survey by Harris Poll found, young people have the highest expectations for companies to behave ethically.
The best way for companies to survive and thrive in an era of HRDD legislation is by improving their management of third party risk. This means starting with a due diligence process that is capable of assessing all third parties for ESG risk, as well as more traditional financial and legal risks.
Acquiring the most relevant data is the first challenge firms face. Assessing ESG risk requires a wide range of trusted data sources, including news coverage going back decades, company data, legal data, PEP data, and more. Technological tools can bring this data together in one place, and automatically search for mentions of a third party–a process which would take a vast amount of staff time if done manually. Platforms such as Nexis Diligence+ can leverage technology to search across all of these datasets and more, to produce a risk score and an ESG rating for each one of your third parties.