"EFAMA sees the establishment of the ESAP as a unique opportunity for advancing the Capital Markets Union, centralising all publicly available ESG and financial information in one place. The information to be included on the platform has to reflect investor's needs ...”
The European
Fund and Asset Management Association (EFAMA) has published its
response to the European Commission's consultation on
the establishment of a European Single Access Point (ESAP) for
financial and non-financial information publicly disclosed
by companies.
Tanguy van de Werve,
Director General of EFAMA, commented: "EFAMA sees the
establishment of the ESAP as a unique opportunity for
advancing the Capital Markets Union, centralising all
publicly available ESG and financial information in one
place. The information to be included on the platform has
to reflect investor's needs and should build on existing EU
and national reporting infrastructures without duplicating
existing reporting requirements.”
In
its response, EFAMA provides six key recommendations for
the development of the platform:
‘File only once’
principle: The
platform should neither duplicate existing reporting
requirements, nor include information that is not
subject to public distribution, such as information
communicated confidentially to investors.
Scope and timeline: The platform should be built
incrementally, differentiating between the priority
levels attributed to ESG and financial information.
The platform's immediate priority should be
centralising ESG company data, while financial
information can be added gradually as the platform
evolves.
ESG data: The cost for retrieving
and using companies' public ESG information is high, owing
to the lack of consistency and the fragmented disclosure
architecture. Public access to standardised sustainability
data reported by investee companies is essential to
unleashing the impact of sustainable finance. Therefore,
the ESAP must establish synergies with the revision of the
NFRD and the preparatory work of EFRAG, so that data
following European sustainability reporting standards (ESS)
is directly channelled into the platform. To better
integrate ESG considerations in investment decisions, a
possible regulatory framework for ESG data providers should
mandate the disclosure of ESG ratings in the ESAP.
SMEs and non-EU companies: By acting as a tool to attract EU
investors, the platform should allow companies not subject
to the NFRD reporting obligations to provide voluntary
disclosures. For this purpose, the ESAP should incorporate
a set of pre-defined sustainability data for companies
choosing to disclose their information voluntarily,
regardless of their size or geographic location. It would be also important for the
platform users to know whether such voluntarily disclosed
information is audited or not.
Data infrastructure: All information included in the ESAP
should be comparable in terms of content and rendered in a
structured, machine-readable and AI-compatible format.
Governance: The platform's governance should
include EU authorities (ESMA, European Commission, Eurostat),
national authorities, investors, reporting companies, EFRAG
and the working group on data and usability of the Platform
on Sustainable Finance. EFAMA would also support a
public-private partnership governing the platform.
Dominik Hatiar, Regulatory
Policy Advisor at EFAMA, commented: "Currently,
issuing entities report information to different
authorities, public databases or stock exchanges, and in
different jurisdictions. Investors would benefit from a
publicly accessible database, that would address the lack
in quality, standardisation and availability of
sustainability and financial information. To meet the new
transparency requirements under the EU sustainable finance
regime, ESAP's immediate priority should be the
centralisation of ESG company data, while financial
information can be added gradually. The ESAP should also
allow for voluntary submissions of ESG disclosures by
companies not subject to the NFRD, which could help attract
EU investors to SMEs and non-EU companies".
EFAMA's full response to the Commission's Consultation on the establishment of a European Single Access Point can be accessed here.
EFAMA
© EFAMA - European Fund and Asset Management Association
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