Client Success Story
Automated & data-driven materiality reporting
Trensition takes an AI-driven approach to analyse Barco’s ESG topics leveraging big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to create real-time insights that assess the materiality of known and emerging issues.
Case: Barco
Sector: Technology
Employees: 3.300
“To win in the coming decade, investors and companies must equip themselves with forward-looking and proactive approaches to materiality.”
Source: Embracing the new age of materiality: harnessing the pace of change in ESG,
World Economic Forum
Strategic Question
Identify and prioritise a business’s most relevant Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) topics, considering each topic’s impact on the organization and its stakeholders.
Objectives
Strengthen Barco’s governance processes
Inform corporate strategy
Prioritise sustainability commitments, targets, and programs
Enhance and integrate reporting
Challenge
Continuous monitoring of material issues is critical to staying on top of emerging risks and opportunities. A materiality assessment helps organizations understand what topics matter most to their business and stakeholders. Every three to four years, Barco conducts a comprehensive materiality assessment to make sure it reflects the latest developments in its business and external environment.
The last assessment, which was done in 2020, was based upon and aligned with their integrated reporting approach, considering six domains.
One hundred eleven stakeholders participated in the surveys and interviews. The resulting materiality matrix has three categories: low, medium and highly material topics.
Historically, the outputs of these assessments are static in nature – capturing a moment in time and often resulting in a backwards-looking view of business priorities. This static view quickly depreciates as organizations seek to develop strategies and disclosures that anticipate future conditions and business needs. However, the advent of Dynamic Materiality is poised to change this static perception and disrupt the future of sustainability and enterprise risk management.
Solution
Trensition performed an AI-powered analysis of Barco’s materiality matrix. Based on AI and big data, the technology automatically scans and analyzes millions of data points from diverse sources to identify and predict ESG topics and score them on the industry context of Barco and the stakeholders.
Impact
While a Dynamic Materiality Assessment – and the dynamic ESG mindset that accompanies it – cannot predict the future, it can strengthen a company’s understanding of stakeholder needs and improve its ability to forecast risk. As the Dynamic Materiality Assessment is future-focused and risk-conscious by nature, it can be an effective precursor to more dynamic corporate ESG actions – such as governance or risk management – that enhance resiliency and build stakeholder trust. As such, we have observed that dynamic systems are not isolated to the topic of the Materiality Assessment but can serve an integrated reporting.
This analysis thoroughly explained how the material topics would most likely evolve in the coming years.
The most significant increases expected for the next year are:
• Learning & development
• Diversity & inclusion
• Climate change & energy
The rise in the importance of people-related materiality topics could be explained as a result of the covid-19 pandemic. Next, the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, COP26, was a catalyst for the topic of climate change to keep growing in importance.
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