SourceForge recently sat down with Novisto’s Co-Founders to learn more about their vision to be the world’s leading software solution for integrated corporate sustainability management.
What is Novisto? What do you do?
We are an enterprise software platform for smarter sustainability and ESG management, with end-to-end capabilities for investor-focused reporting and business insights. In short, we help our customers get organized, trust their data, make sense of the evolving trends and expectations of the market, and get better and smarter at ESG management.
At Novisto, we believe technology will be a catalyst for achieving corporate adoption of environmental, social and governance (ESG) best practices. Our purpose is to advance a more inclusive and resilient society by enabling organizations to create value through sustainability. Our vision is to be the world’s leading software solution for integrated corporate sustainability management.
What does “ESG” mean? How is that different from sustainability or CSR?
ESG is an acronym to summarize specific environmental, social, and governance issues (“non-financial”) that pertain to sustainable business practices and can affect the company’s operating and financial performance.
Proactive, deliberate management of sustainability (used interchangeably with ESG) risks and opportunities translates into lower costs, improved stakeholder relations, and (increasingly) better access to capital.
CSR as a concept and function has traditionally been relegated to a silo that is not considered core to business performance or value creation. There is a legacy understanding of CSR as being limited to philanthropy and volunteering.
Edouard Clément (left), Charles Assaf (center) and Marian Borca (right)
What are some concrete examples of ESG data and performance metrics?
- “E” examples: Scope 1, 2, and 3 GHG emissions data; percentage of energy derived from renewable resources; water management and operational exposure to regions with water scarcity.
- “S” examples: Human capital management (employee turnover rates, engagement, training, workforce diversity); approach to and coverage of audits for social risks in the supply chain (forced labor).
- “G” examples: Board composition metrics (diversity, independence, age, tenure, etc.); separation of CEO and Chair roles; description and accountability structure of Board-level oversight over ESG issues.
What are your customers’ key pain points?
Our customers have several pain points as it related to ESG data management and reporting:
- Labor intensive process of collecting data, from multiple data sources, with little or no data verification (poor reliability).
- Multiple reporting standards and frameworks that are all somehow different, asking for different things; voluntary nature of sustainability reporting does little to dispel confusion.
- Growing number of information requests from a variety of sources, including customers, investors, bankers, insurers, third-party ratings, rankings, index providers, (and now) data aggregators.
- Limited resources, both human (very small team, sometimes one person) and capital (small budget).
- Lack of buy-in and understanding from some leadership teams, who may not recognize the strategic importance of sustainability nor the importance of providing the market with decision-useful ESG information.
What makes Novisto unique among other SaaS companies in your space?
We at Novisto have built a flexible and adaptive platform to accommodate the rapid changes in the ESG ecosystem: consolidation of frameworks, new frameworks, standardization, regulation. Our platform model and APIs are ready to support evolving standards and protocols. We will be uniquely helping customers manage their ESG data with the same rigor as financial data (we are building an ESG accounting system).
We not only help to manage the tactical part, but provide insight to support strategy: how am I performing? What about my peers? Is this information useful to an investor? What do my investors care about?
Finally, we are distinctive with our deep ESG focus, innovative technology, investor-friendly reporting guidance, intuitive user experience, and the use of AI (for parsing and analytics) that help drive decision-making and improved performance.
What does implementation generally look like? How does your platform integrate with other systems/software?
Deployment includes gathering requirements, initial data assessment, account creation, and account setup. Our flexible model can be easily interfaced with complex sources via standardized APIs, structured data exchange protocols, or out-of-the-box connectors.
We are also able to integrate seamlessly with existing tools and databases-our customers don’t have to necessarily change the way they collect data and we adapt their data to the requirements of reporting frameworks or questionnaires.
Why should companies consider a solution like Novisto now?
There are growing demands made of companies to provide more and better ESG information. There is also Increasing recognition of the strategic value of sustainability–this importance is now being elevated to the C-suite (including CFO), and the Board with growing pressure from investors.
There is also a growing recognition by society in general, and capital markets in particular, of the interconnection between the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of prosperity and wellbeing. The regulatory winds are blowing towards mandated sustainable reporting (Europe). Finally, there is no current end-to-end solution for data management, investor-focused reporting, and strategic insights as they relate to ESG.
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