DEMOCRATISING SUSTAIN A BILITY

Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to the founder and CEO of Rimm Sustainability, Ravi Chidambaram, about the company’s vision for simplifying and democratising sustainability throughout all market sectors.

Rimm Sustainability is a unique partner for companies in almost any sector. It builds software platforms that provide businesses with the opportunity to monitor their sustainability in detail. By providing the software, alongside training to use it, companies are able to take that information and develop their own frameworks. And because it is available to companies of all sizes, Rimm sees its mission as simplifying and democratising sustainability.

Ravi Chidambaram, the founder and CEO of Rimm Sustainability, lays out this mission in more depth:

“We started around three years ago and we’ve really grown very quickly since we began. Our headquarters is in Singapore, but we also have two international offices in London and Japan.

“We set up as a sustainability software platform with a mission to democratise sustainability and simplify it for companies of all sizes. We believe in serving entire ecosystems and not just the enterprise companies, which traditionally is where most sustainability activity has been focused. By and large, we’ve succeeded in that mission.

“The platform and toolbox offer users many different solutions, applications, and data around their sustainability performance. It’s tailored to companies of different sizes, ranging from SMEs to multinational conglomerates. We can also customise each package to suit each client because at present there’s no common definition of sustainability, meaning everyone has different requirements. That type of customisation is very important for our business.”

For Small Businesses

The lack of a common definition for sustainability, and therefore the customisability of Rimm’s platform, is at the heart of the company’s success. Sustainability reporting can be obscure and complicated. The platform makes entering this increasingly important area accessible to almost anyone.

“For smaller companies and SMEs, the goal is really just to get started in sustainability measurements, and the myCSO product is perfect for driving this,” Mr. Chidambaram says. “Most small companies haven’t done any sort of exercises in sustainability before. They don’t know what to track, how to track it, what it means, why is it important for them, or how they can start setting targets and objectives.

“myCSO platform is the right product for them. It’s inexpensive, accessible and easy to use – a good starter level product. It doesn’t take a lot of setup time and is a good introduction to sustainability, a good education in how it works and why it matters. myCSO helps SMEs to set their goals and objectives by measuring performance, helping them to improve their ESG outputs, meet compliance needs and get started on data management, data collection, understanding how they’re performing, and issuing reports for their website or stakeholders.”

Within the myCSO platform, Rimm has built in a further three levels of functionality. Each of these provide expanding levels of detail, so that the platform can grow alongside the company that’s using it. The most basic level, myCSO starter, is in fact a free tool.

This is an essential service for small businesses, who often have enough on their plate when it comes to KPIs and other metrics. As sustainability becomes increasingly important across all markets, myCSO provides an opportunity to get ahead.

For Those At The Top

However, it’s not just SMEs that can make use of Rimm’s solutions. The company is increasingly looking towards what it calls enterprise clients, or major companies that run national and international operations.

“We also sell our solutions to enterprise clients,” explains Mr. Chidambaram. “They’re interested in two key processes: compliance and reporting. Compliance is getting more and more onerous for large companies. If you’re in the EU, for example, there is a huge volume of taxonomy requirements now. The UK is similar, and it’s pretty much true in every jurisdiction. At the same time, there’s a lot of headaches around compliance and reporting that they need to manage.

“We support almost every single major global standard in the world. If there’s a national or international standard you need to comply with, chances are you’ll find it on our platform. That really cuts through the complexity because there are hundreds of questions and rules worldwide. It’s very confusing and makes it difficult to know what to report and whether the report is compliant with local regulators and so on. In that sense, we really cut through the complexity and make it easy for clients to use.”

This platform is called manage+ and can integrate with a company’s existing metrics software.

“This is crucial because enterprise clients also have what I would say is strategic use cases around sustainability,” Mr. Chidambaram says. “A lot of them are thinking of sustainability beyond compliance or tick the box reporting. They’re actually integrating it into different parts of the organisation: their supply chain, their sourcing, their manufacturing, the way they manage their staff and so on. Rimm is really helpful here. This is where our data and applications can help companies start to delve into these areas and help them start building strategic solutions for use within the organisation.”

Rimm Sustainability also provides customized enterprise solutions, “Rimm in-a-box” where enterprises such as MNCs, Financial Investors, Business service firms and government entities can mix and match Rimm’s building blocks such as education, assessment library, data collection, ratings, reports and analytics and data for customised solutions like ESG ratings, directories, strategy, certifications and ESG platform white labeling which are delivered via co-development and APIs.

Community Outreach

Beyond its products helping others in their sustainability commitments, Rimm also engages in its own social responsibility initiatives. Unsurprisingly, many of these also focus on sustainability.

“We do a lot of community outreach programs,”Mr Chidambaram says. “We have a fairly high-profile net zero campaign in the UK, for example. With that, we’re trying to make SMEs more aware of their emissions responsibilities and the need to think about net zero. It’s a digital campaign that’s gone out to thousands of UK SMEs. It also talks about the consequences of not starting to engage with sustainability responsibilities.

“We then illustrate how Rimm’s platform can help start them on their journey through calculating their emissions baselines and working on the targets and solutions to reduce it. I understand that the campaign is being highlighted through different media channels. Companies in the UK have received the campaign very well.”

According to Rimm’s Barriers To Net Zero report, 63% of SMEs in the UK lack a climate reduction impact plan in place. This awareness-raising campaign is, therefore, crucial in getting a vast swathe of the UK’s marketplace onboard.

Meanwhile, the company is also trying to generate interest elsewhere, as Mr. Chidambaram illustrates:

“Meanwhile, in Singapore, we do a lot of educational programs and content programs for government level as well as community level companies to raise awareness around sustainability issues. And then, in some developing companies like Indonesia and India, we’ve run programs to raise community-level and corporate-level awareness around environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

“Rimm is also very active on the speaker circuit worldwide. We’re always preaching the gospel around sustainability.”

Trends In Engagement

Part of Rimm’s democratising vision is that its solutions are accessible to companies of any size.

“We are industry agnostic,” states Mr. Chidambaram. “We support all 69 GICS industry classifications and 130 sub-industries. From the beginning we said that we wanted to democratise sustainability, and for us that means serving all segments.”

Nonetheless, Rimm is able to see a pattern in terms of which companies are drawn to its software.

“Certain segments tend to be more excited about it than others,” the CEO explains. “There’s two clear trends in this respect. The first is companies that are on the frontline of the sustainability debate. Resource-intensive or manufacturing companies that have large emissions and materials footprints that they need to account for. Having a tight grip on metrics is crucial because they tend to be in the public spotlight, and they’re also part of global supply chains that demand a greater level of sustainability. As a result, having a platform that does a lot of the legwork for them is invaluable. So, manufacturing and resource-intensive companies are good clients of ours.

“The other trend is in green products and sustainable brand companies. They feel there’s a competitive advantage to being very sustainable. Whether it’s to be a better employer so their employees are more loyal to them, or whether it’s coming up with green products. That’s more of a fast moving consumer goods, brand-facing type industry, often at a smaller scale. However, we can tailor a solution towards their needs too.”

Big Dreams

Rimm has three years under its belt, and while it’s still a young company, it has already made incredible headway in achieving its bold aims. It’s already developing new software for its enterprise clients, including climate risks 360, a platform that enables its users to assess the potential impact of climate risks on their finances.

Rimm isn’t about to stop there, though, and has big plans for the next few years as Mr. Chidambaram lays out:

“I think that our primary aim is to sign up as many SME users as possible. We really want to be one of the largest, if not the largest, ESG sustainability software companies for that market tier. That’s a big goal, but one we believe we can succeed in. We want an eco-system that builds recognition of our brand.”

“Our secondary aim is on the enterprise side of the market as we expand our referencable projects. These are our big projects where we achieve certain meaningful outcomes for major, recognisable names and it helps spread the Rimm name around even further. We’re really excited about what this will bring us in the future.”