Summary Bullets:
• Vodafone Business Germany’s partnership with Envoria offers CSRD-compliant ESG reporting for enterprises as service providers continue to shift toward offering technology-enabled business solutions.
• Growing range of ESG reporting portals being made available to enterprises from telecoms services providers to meet evolving legislation and customer demand.
Vodafone Business Germany has teamed with Envoria, a sustainability reporting specialist, to help its customers meet the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting requirements of the European Union Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). This requires sustainability reporting by large companies and listed SMBs. Some non-EU companies also must report if they generate over EUR150 million in the European Union market. The companies must apply the rules for the first time in the 2024 financial year for reports published in 2025.
The new offering, ESG Navigator, aims to act as an all-in-one solution for collecting and analyzing ESG data. According to Vodafone, “companies can use the tool as a central collection point for all relevant data, bringing together sources from different locations and systems for processing and analysis.”
The tool lets customers create and export reports, including visualizations that comply with the CSRD’s predefined templates. Alongside the tool, Vodafone Germany is also offering workshops, training courses, and demos to help customers’ relevant employees to use the software correctly.
The scope of regulation both for telecoms services providers and their customers continues to grow because technology plays an ever greater role in all business and personal aspects of life, and because the technology sector as a whole is a major source of greenhouse gases – most notably this has recently been further highlighted by the impact of generative AI (GenAI) in data center usage, with both Microsoft and Google admitting the impact of heavy cloud computing usage is responsible for their net-zero targets being impacted. They are still committed to reducing their emissions, but they are going to have to be very smart and innovative to meet their goals. This also impacts enterprises along the supply chain as part of Scope 3 emissions targets – which are tougher than Scopes 1 and 2 where companies have greater direct control.
Failure to comply with the EU’s goals, or goals set by corporations themselves, will potentially attract fines by the EU (and other) regulators. Other potential negative impacts include corporate reputation and a growing number of customers and consumers choosing only to deal with enterprises that they perceive to be responsible. This is particularly true in Germany where the Green Party (even though its vote share in the recent European Parliament election fell to 12%, it is indicative of substantial environmental concerns in the country).
Offering solutions like these also makes commercial sense for telecom services providers targeting the enterprise market. As noted in GlobalData’s recent quarterly SMB Watch report, there is a continued movement away from selling connectivity products to selling services that have tangible positive business impacts. These are largely focused on productivity and security, but increasingly include sustainability – and they will embrace GenAI over time too.
