A slice of SGX Reporting for Breakfast at Paia

Paia held a Breakfast Briefing, July 15th to help Singaporean corporate reporters on their journey to producing meaningful, useful and compliant sustainability reports.

Paia Associate Director, Alex Nichols and Principal Consultant, Ms Wong Dan Chi gave us valuable insights and recommendations on how to build a good sustainability report and meet the new requirements of SGX’s Sustainability Guide.

The group of twenty breakfasting participants discussed why companies report and how embarking on a sustainability journey can lead to opportunities and benefits for a company. Paia’s experience is that companies always benefit from the ‘act’ of reporting, particularly the process of prioritising the issues to report on – i.e., the “materiality process”. Doing this well – with the involvement of top management – can lead to better employee engagement, knitting the teams together. It can improve relationships with external stakeholders such as customers, suppliers and investors. This can benefit the company business model – creating and protecting value.

Wong Dan Chi, took us through what to expect in practice from SGX requirements: the nuts and bolts of dealing with the 711A/B rule and how to organise your sustainability report. An example we discussed was about targets for each material issue and how to report SGX-compliant targets (they can be qualitative at first). We also discussed how to measure the opinion of external stakeholders and resolved that a simple approach will be sufficient at first, with depth and wider application of it as a business technique later in your sustainability journey. Other discussions looked at practicalities of whether a physical report is required, or whether a standalone report is required (no, and no).

Paia’s Sustainability Reporting Toolkit-Training package is for companies who wish write their report in-house. We have worked hard to generate a way for companies to learn intensively what they need to do in practice to meet SGX requirements for mandatory sustainability reporting (and beyond). A one-day training is complemented by a Handbook specially developed for training participants, along with bespoke Excel-based tools and a Sustainability Report Sample Tool.

Are you an new reporter (large, medium or small) requiring help with sustainability reporting? Please contact us at info@paiaconsulting.com for more on our “Sustainability Report Toolkit”.