Spend Management Firm SpendHQ Unveils ESG Procurement Help Tools

SpendHQ says it wants to help companies meet their procurement goals and meet ESG standards.

To that end, the spend intelligence and procurement performance management firm on Tuesday (Feb. 21) debuted a series of environmental, social and governance (ESG) features to help companies manage diversity and sustainability initiatives.

“Procurement can significantly impact ESG progress, but a better approach has been needed to easily identify opportunities to make a bigger impact and to accurately measure procurement’s contribution,” Spend HQ Chief Product Officer Pierre Laprée said in a news release.

“As new regulations are introduced, businesses need a clear, holistic view into non-financial performance to identify which procurement levers will help them reduce emissions, diversify their supplier networks and comply with governance changes.”

SpendHQ said the tools are designed to help companies remain current on new regulatory compliance changes, such as the EU’s Supply Chain Law and Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). 

Among the new features are tools that let businesses keep track of their spending with diverse suppliers and a tool that helps customers get a better idea of emissions output.

These features “give customers a competitive edge on accessing, monitoring and improving non-financial performance metrics to support efforts to comply with new policies and corporate commitments in today’s responsible business environment.,” SpendHQ said.

PYMNTS wrote last year that the rise of ESG issues are increasingly central to fund managers’ investment strategies, with one projection showing ESG-mandated assets on track to represent half of all professionally managed assets globally by 2024.

In Europe, for example, much of the expected growth will likely be fueled by the advent of new European Union disclosure regulations.

It’s also led to an increased number of regulatory technology (RegTech) firms that offer ways to help investors make sure their money isn’t going to carbon-emitting sectors.

As PYMNTS reported last year, the need for investors and asset managers to comply with ESG rules has led to the creation of innovative accounting frameworks and new data tools.

“Building a detailed picture of the carbon emissions and fossil fuel exposure of complex financial instruments requires data that extends across both the financial data that RegTechs and rating agencies have always mobilized, as well as alternative datasets that have not traditionally been exploited,” PYMNTS wrote, adding that these include “industrial information, ESG reports, corporate relations data and various third-party datasets.”