ESG Services mainly for SMEs

“Sustainable businesses of the future are built in the present. Many of them have to examine their operations from a sustainability perspective. OPTEN helps businesses with its ESG services not only for strategic reasons, but also as a mission statement. Our aim is to help the domestic business community understand sustainability issues, understand their own situation and that of their partners, and then make informed business decisions based on the knowledge and credible data they have acquired.”
Tamás Tóth, Managing Director

Company name:

Opten Informatikai Kft.

Implementation year:

2022-

Focus Areas:

Transparency

Program objective:

In Hungary, the SME sector accounts for a significant share of firms (490 880 firms in 2022, 1 392 668 employees).

We find that:

Sustainability is not yet part of their everyday life,
their capacity is insufficient, and
and they are struggling to keep up on the cost side.

This is where our ESG services can help.

Our aim is to help companies transform their operations and mindset to respond to sustainability-related regulatory requirements in a timely and appropriate manner.

Program measures and commitments:

If a company completes the questionnaire presented above to a satisfactory standard, it can request its own ESG report based on the data.

Although the SME sector will only be affected by regulatory requirements, in particular the CSRD Regulation, years down the line, meeting these requirements is a major task. It is therefore essential to understand the relevance of the topic now.

We have designed our ESG services with these in mind.

ESG Index

The ESG index, published in January 2022, uniquely assesses all well-performing companies in Hungary, in addition to large listed companies.

We show not only an aggregated ESG index, but also E, S and G sub-indexes, which clearly indicate where companies need to improve more.

The index is largely based on publicly available data. Nowadays, many domestic banks monitor these scores, which can help to facilitate financiers’ decision making and their ESG assessment of companies.

Self-assessment ESG platform

This is a questionnaire-based platform that lists 78 questions for respondents to answer on a range of topics. As a result of completion, company-specific data are incorporated into the company index and modify its value.

ESG report

The OPTEN Automated ESG Report is a few-page document that fully follows the structure of the GRI framework. In addition to basic company information, it includes an industry benchmark on the ESG index and CO2e emissions, followed by information on the key topics of the E, S and G legs.

What all companies have to do is to provide the data we require, and the process results in an ESG report covering a wide range of topics, priced according to the resource level of the SMEs. And the content and structure of the service itself has been accredited by the world’s largest and best-known framework provider, GRI, after a six-month audit period, the first in Hungary.

Program Impact and Results

The educational nature of our services has been a clear success since their launch.

Since the launch of the report product, 100% of the questionnaires have been submitted in “report ready” status, which means that a sufficient number of questions have been answered and the output generated is suitable for ESG reporting.

And the digital alternative to reporting provides domestic SMEs with the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage over their international competitors, as up-to-date ESG reporting becomes a prerequisite for an increasing number of tenders.

Keywords:

EU Taxonomy, CSRD regulation