Komunidad tapped by SEC to streamline sustainability reporting in the Philippines

Philippine regulatory body Securities and Exchange Commission has linked with Komunidad to improve and streamline the submission of sustainability reports of local companies.

The SEC, through its corporate governance and finance department, inked a Memorandum of Agreement with Komunidad on October 16.

Under the MOA, Komunidad will customize the SEC Sustainability Reporting (SuRe) framework application, which is seen to help the regulatory body in collecting, managing, and verifying sustainability data submitted by publicly-listed companies.

This new partnership will pave the way towards setting a new standard in sustainability reporting in the Philippines thus, contributing overall to creating a more accountable business environment and a future-proof Philippines.

Since 2019, the SEC mandated the submission of sustainability reporting for publicly-listed companies, but the companies have been relying on manual approach through spreadsheets. This was proven to be prone to human mistakes and inefficient.  

“Komunidad’s contribution in providing innovative solutions via online submission platform is in line with SEC’s initiative to streamline the data capture and management of sustainability reports and simplify the process in the submission of the SuRe form,” SEC Commission Karlo S. Bello said.

Bello also expressed confidence that SEC’s partnership with Komunidad will help in achieving “our common goal of embracing industrial developments while gearing towards a greener capital market and sustainable future.”

For its part, Komunidad conducted workshops with SEC stakeholders and assessed the existing processes of the regulatory body to identify areas of improvement to help with smooth integration of the new platform into the existing operations of SEC.

Komunidad has also built an intuitive interface for the publicly-listed companies that will rely on the SuRe platform, while ensuring that the SEC can easily access, manage, and analyze the data submitted to them. The platform was also created with features that can accommodate future changes in reporting requirements.

With simplified reporting, it is hoped that more companies will be encouraged to submit their sustainable reports that will, in turn, allow the SEC to gain a deeper understanding of how companies manage their commitment to sustainability.

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