(c) Sébastien Bertrand
The EU’s proposed omnibus proposal could increase costs and reporting burdens for companies, asset managers told Green Central Banking on The Sustainability Omnibus Podcast.
“Shifting the standards for EU business … that are part of a larger group and have already implemented will only add additional costs and reporting burden, because the framework is going to change [which] creates more costs to accompany this change, to implement it,” Héléna Charrier, head of socially responsible investing at La Banque Postale Asset Management (LBPAM) said.
LBPAM is a mid-sized company so it has reporting requirements under the corporate sustainability reporting directive (CSRD). It also relies on data from third parties to manage its portfolios, which it had hoped the CSRD would help with by requiring companies within those portfolios to produce the relevant data. Now asset managers like LBPAM may need to continue paying for estimates that may not be as accurate.
“We still have numerous data gaps… And this actually means that investors bear a lot of costs in seeking that information, and sometimes of course we can’t fix this at all, and so we must rely on estimates,” Charrier said.
Robust reporting is vital for the transition to a green economy, said Mathilde Dufour, head of sustainability research at asset manager Mirova.
“If we want to accelerate the ecological transition, we need solid and auditable data,” she said.
The lack of requirements for standardised data under the omnibus proposals would mean not only relying on third-party data, but investors would also lose the ability to control data quality unless it was produced internally. It could also have an impact on how Europe can integrate and use AI to advance the transition. AI has the potential to process information more efficiently, which is a strategic issue for the EU at the moment.
“Having meaningful AI means that we need to have robust ESG data in each entry, because otherwise the limits of AI will be that it will not be able to [process] the data that’s not there already,” Dufour said.
Find out what else Dufour and Charrier have to say about the EU’s omnibus proposal on the latest episodes of the Sustainability Omnibus Podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms.
This page was last updated April 5, 2025
Written by
Moriah Costa is the Editor-in-Chief of Green Central Banking and has over a decade of experience writing about banking and finance. She is an award-winning American journalist based in Paris and has written for major international publications, including Reuters, The Guardian, and S&P Global. Having grown up in water-stressed Arizona, she has always had a strong interest in bringing awareness to climate and environmental issues.
