How CFOs can leverage CSRD for financial competitiveness – Findings from the ESG100

1. Transforming compliance into operational efficiency

While ESG data collection is crucial for compliance, it can also reveal operational inefficiencies that, once addressed, lead to cost savings and productivity gains.This focus on data quality highlights opportunities for CFOs to use ESG insights to optimize resources, improve sustainability practices, and identify areas where they are overspending unnecessarily.

“Sustainability and competitiveness have to go hand-in-hand to make long term value.”

Joachim Nahem, Executive Chairman, Position Green

Example action: Logistics data is often one of the lowest-hanging fruit opportunities for financial and sustainable gain. By conducting a thorough supply chain assessment, you can see not only where there are inefficiencies in routing for your freight units, but you can identify over-expenditures of fuelling, loading, and then even trace this back to the very beginning of your supply chain, tapping into scope 3 emissions at the same time as mitigating your own.

Long-term impact: This puts you in a position to proactively audit your current logistical operations and it gives you greater visibility on the partners in your supply chain, whose own costs and energy usage can be brought down. These sorts of yields are so impactful because they compound, and put you in a position to competitively analyze where you are paying too much for certain services compared to others.

2. Strengthen brand value and stakeholder trust

Transparency in ESG reporting is essential for building stakeholder trust, and today’s investors and consumers expect companies to demonstrate genuine accountability. With the majority of European businesses now having to comply with CSRD and ESRS this year and next, financial leaders are in a unique position to benchmark their performance on a level playing field with their competitors and then relate that back to key stakeholders.

“Our biggest asset is the trust that the customers put on us.”

Diego Garcia Solares, Group Vice President & Head of ESG and Internal Control, Santander

Investors alone are demanding more than surface-level data. They want depth, they want transparency, and they want to know that what you’re reporting aligns with what you’re doing. CFOs can use ESG data to build a reputation of credibility and resilience, giving stakeholders confidence in the company’s future.

Example action: CFOs can focus on standardized ESG reporting through frameworks like CSRD or TCFD to ensure clear, reliable disclosures. This kind of high-quality data highlights longer-term risks that may have been hidden either across your organization or your supply chains, and puts you in a position to foster resilience in your operations across years, rather than quarters.

Long-term impact: This helps to foster stronger investor relationships and customer loyalty. You don’t just communicate to your customers that you are a conscientious business with ethical business practices, but you are able to invest proactively in the resilience, and therefore the value of your organization.

3. Enhance risk management with ESG insights

ESG data provides CFOs with valuable information for identifying and managing risks, especially in areas related to climate change, regulatory shifts, and supply chain dependencies. 

Your suppliers are an extension of your ESG footprint. You can’t be compliant unless you know where your risks are within the supply chain. For CFOs, ensuring transparency along the entire value chain is essential not only for compliance but also for avoiding disruptions and financial risks.

Example action: CFOs can evaluate supply chain emissions and supplier ESG practices to proactively manage risks. While risk mitigation isn’t always the most value-driving activity, there is a new paradigm to consider through CSRD – the businesses you work with (and those that work with you) are affected by your compliance.

Long-term impact: Integrating ESG-driven risk management into financial planning makes the company more resilient and better prepared to handle future regulatory or environmental challenges.

4. Future-proof financial strategy through ESG and financial data integration

CFOs can derive the most strategic value from ESG data when it’s integrated directly with financial metrics, creating a unified view of the organization’s performance. This integration allows CFOs to make sure that ESG data and financial data aren’t telling different stories. By aligning ESG with financial goals, CFOs can reinforce their commitment to sustainable growth and sound financial planning.

“There’s an opportunity here for companies to strategically position themselves and start addressing the topics that they really understand.”

Calum Revfem, Senior Director, Position Green

Example action: Double materiality, done right, can strengthen brand value by showcasing a company’s commitment to addressing its most relevant sustainability issues transparently.

They’re also able to bring their sustainability home in terms of how their green data aligns to their financial data.

Long-term impact: The faster that you are able to start treating your sustainability data as an extension of your financial data, the more opportunities you’ll be able to uncover for value creation, and critically, you’ll be able to bring your compliance under the umbrella of your financial KPIs.

Converting sustainability into a financial value creator

By taking a proactive stance towards CSRD, CFOs have an opportunity to turn compliance into a competitive advantage. By focusing on data quality, transparency, risk management, strategic resource allocation, and financial integration, you can start to uncover not only untapped resources, but opportunities that can both ignite new agendas within your boardroom and a competitive edge in your day-to-day operations.

But to do that requires the proper tools to both stay ahead of compliance and to gain strategic overview of all your data, which is where Position Green can help.

Our complete ESG reporting software cuts down compliance admin by 50%, but it also collates all your sustainability data in one place, putting you in a position to harness those insights for greater financial resilience and strategic opportunity.

If you want to learn more about how it can provide a complete strategic solution to managing your ESG data, our team would love to chat!