ESG
OLD CONCEPT, NEW URGENCY During the Finance Meets HR Summit, South Africa’s leading finance and HR professionals revealed that it is their responsibility as key decision-makers and leaders to drive the ESG agenda within their organisations.
O
n 15 October, thousands of finance professionals streamed into the gamified conference and expo for the first-ever virtual Finance Indaba Network. The Finance Indaba, which is normally held at the Sandton Convention Centre once a year, was reinvented as an online event to adhere to lockdown regulations.
Insights principal and interim CEO Andrey Bogdanov, who delivered the keynote address.
Finance and HR leaders from across the province gathered in their numbers at PwC in Waterfall on 3 March, delighted to have the opportunity to once again interact in person after two years of social isolation. During the Finance Meets HR Summit, the executives discussed the changing emphasis in corporate South Africa around the importance of addressing the environmental, social and governance impact their businesses have.
The attendees broke away into two separate groups to participate in an exciting new concept – a boardroom simulation. They were presented with a case study of Company X, and were tasked with fixing the environmental wrong it had committed. While the simulation was hypothetical, it yielded extremely relevant realworld insights.
“ESG has always been around us, but with different letters and names, including corporate social responsibility and corporate social investment,” explained Risk
30
CFO MAGAZINE • CFO.CO.ZA
He took the attendees through a brief history of the ESG transformations we’ve seen over the last decade, starting in 2010, when ISO released a set of voluntary standards to help companies implement, to 2022, where we are starting to see ESG initiatives in action.
Successes and challenges After a short networking break, the CFOs and CHROs again broke into two groups for panel discussions,
