Wolters Kluwer Corporate Performance & ESG (CP & ESG) has added ESG standards, tailored to support Internal Audit workflow and practices, to its award-winning, cloud-based TeamMate+ global audit expert solution portfolio.

This addition to a core Wolters Kluwer CP & ESG solution comes in a month during which the division celebrates pre-eminent customer recognition and high scores for ESG solutions in both Dresner and Verdantix reports. Meanwhile, ESG considerations are increasingly viewed as key business drivers and strategic imperatives, essential to the work of internal auditors. By enabling access to ESG reporting standards and frameworks, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), EU Taxonomy, and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), within the TeamMate+ environment, auditors are now able to accelerate ESG audits to lead assurance efforts for corporate ESG reporting.

“Our nearly 30-year-long relationship with internal audit professionals across industries and regions continues to help us identify the critical needs and capabilities required by our customers,” says Frans Klaassen, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Wolters Kluwer TeamMate. “As businesses invest increasing time and resources on ESG considerations, we can now provide ESG standards in an audit-ready format to drive ESG assurance activities. This is where TeamMate+ ESG significantly enhances capabilities.”

The news follows the company being named a “Top Vendor” in the inaugural “2023 Environmental, Social, and Governance Reporting (ESG) Market Study”, published by Dresner Advisory Services. The report collates data gathered from users in a variety of roles, throughout multiple industries and analyzes the priorities, current usage, and future intentions of end-user organizations.

The findings revealed that all the vendors assessed provide a basic level of ESG features, with only a limited number offering the capacity to support ESG standards. The report rated Wolters Kluwer as the leading ESG vendor based on its available combination of ESG features and support for ESG standards.

“I am delighted that Wolters Kluwer has once again, emerged as a leader in the ESG space, providing essential connectivity between enterprise performance management capabilities and ESG reporting. I thank Dresner for its recognition, and my colleagues for their continuing hard work and success,” says Ralf Gärtner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, CP & ESG, at Wolters Kluwer. “This is in addition to the capacity to support multiple reporting frameworks, linking ESG narrative reporting with financial disclosures. We are pleased to see further hard evidence of customers’ confidence that our solutions are driving up standards of corporate responsibility, workplace safety, global sustainability, and regulatory compliance across multiple industry sectors.”

“ESG considerations are clearly here to stay and, more than that, they are shifting towards the centre of business planning, compliance and risk management,” says Howard Dresner, Founder, and Chief Research Officer of Dresner Advisory Services. “It is essential, therefore, that ESG vendors increasingly factor in the current and future needs of their customers and remain current with demand in the market and the direction of travel of ESG obligations and objectives. We congratulate Wolters Kluwer for their rating at the top of our inaugural ESG market vendor assessment.

The CP & ESG division was created in March 2023 “to meet the growing demand from corporations and banks for integrated financial, operational, and ESG performance management and reporting solutions,” according to Paul Lyon, Wolters Kluwer’s Senior Director, External Communications. “CP & ESG brings together Wolters Kluwer’s global software businesses that focus on corporate performance management, environmental health and safety (EHS), and risk: (CCH Tagetik, Enablon, FRR, and TeamMate). By leveraging the natural synergy that exists across these businesses, the company will be able to better serve its customers and drive accelerated growth by extending and integrating its current product portfolio.”