In recent years, ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) has become a key topic in global capital markets, particularly on Wall Street, where an increasing number of investors and companies are incorporating it into their decision-making processes.

However, in practice, many businesses still face challenges such as the lack of standardized frameworks, difficulties in data collection, and integrating ESG strategies into their core operations.

Additionally, with the Trump administration’s adjustments to ESG regulatory policies and growing market concerns over “greenwashing,” the path forward for ESG has become more complex.

Against this backdrop, Mark Blick, Diginex’s CEO, recently spoke with Wall Street Frontline to share his insights on ESG trends and discuss how businesses can achieve sustainable growth amid tightening regulations and increasing market demands. Diginex Limited is a software company based in Hong Kong and London, primarily engaged in providing SaaS solutions for ESG, climate, and supply chain data collection and reporting for companies of all sizes.

Wall Street Frontline: ESG is becoming a more and more important concept for financial decisions on the Wall Street. However, businesses are still facing a lot of challenges such as lack of standardization and lack of data collection. So, in your opinion, what is the biggest challenge that businesses are facing right now?

Mark Blick: I think there are several and I think it's right. There's on the one hand you have an opportunity, but also at the same time it can be difficult for businesses, particularly the ones that we focus on, which generally are mid-cap companies who are new to ESG reporting and who are just finding their way on the foothills of sustainability in terms of how they operationalize this at scale. Sometimes, a lot of the time, the conversations I have, it's around helping our clients overcome a feeling of fear. It's a fear of, well, if I do this and I don't do it right, I'm not going to look good. I'm going to look stupid. Or if I do this and I don't do it right, I'm going to get shouted at by a legal firm or an NGO or somebody externally. Or if I do this right and I do it well, because I don't have a team of in-house sustainability consultants who can help me polish this, my scores won't be very good.

I'll get rated an F minus and so I'll still get shouted at. So, for us, it's around how can we show companies that tools like ours that exist in the market can help them achieve outsized results and take those first steps within sustainability reporting and overcome that fear. For most companies, when you speak to them and let's say they've been around for a minimum of five years, they've got $5 million, $10 million and over in revenue, and you speak to them and they begin to realize very quickly that, oh, this is something I'm already reporting on.

It's called something else. It's done by different people within the organization. But often it's just about bringing these disparate threads within the company together and weaving it into an overall company strategy that they realize, I'm covering 70% of this already. This is not as big a task as I originally thought it was going to be.

Wall Street Frontline: So how can businesses ensure that the score actually reflects their efforts?

Mark Blick: My advice would be authenticity. And I think this has been a challenge for companies as they start reporting on sustainability.

I think the first reaction is, there's a hundred things, I need to report on a hundred things. And you see a lot of companies come up with a 50, 60, 100-page sustainability report. And it's not possible for companies who are new to this or lack resources of some of the larger multinationals to engage in an effort with so many indicators, with so many different things they need to report on.

Hopefully for us, through the reporting software that we have, is giving them the confidence to say, we're going to choose 10 things that really matter to us, that we really care about. And rather than spending 95% of their time on data collection and reporting, they're spending, call it 50% of their time on data collection and reporting on a set of 10 indicators they really care about. Have the confidence to tell the market that there are other things they're not going to do this year, but they may come to next year or the year after.

But for now, the focus is on showing progress on these subsegments of 10 indicators and spending 50% of their time putting in innovative solutions that can help them show progress.

Wall Street Frontline: Yeah, from the report I read, I noticed that Diginex is incorporating AI into the ESG reporting.  So how has your solution differentiated itself from other existing ESG tools on the market right now?

Mark Blick: We have always stayed very close to a vision from one of our co-founder, Jessica Camus, who pitched us on this idea five or six years ago. And she had worked as a non-executive director of a UK-listed small cap back in 2017, 2018. And she had seen firsthand how difficult the sustainability reporting journey was.

It was six months spent over 10 tabs on an Excel spreadsheet, sent around 30 different people. And at the end of the day, they still had to send it to an expensive external consultant to polish it and make sense of it.

We looked at the market，and what we saw was that there was a lot of solutions out there that focused on advanced sustainability reporting companies that knew exactly what they were doing and have wonderful reports. And that's a great part of the market. What we really wanted to focus on and have consistently focused on, I still think quite uniquely, is what I jokingly call the “grumpy CFO” end of the market.

It's the companies who are new to this that maybe five years ago believed that sustainability reporting belonged in marketing, but is now realizing, because they're being shouted at by a regulator, by a customer, by an investor, by society at large, that this is something that should be brought within the remit of the general counsel or the CFO and are looking to take the first steps in sustainability reporting without spending too much money on external consultants. Our focus has been very clearly defined on that demographic. Everything we do with the service, you may have had one, I've had one, we have one, that grumpy CFO demographic. How do we make that person's life easier?

Wall Street Frontline: Diginex also partnered with a lot of big-name banks such as HSBC and also regulators like you just mentioned. Today, we also welcomed guests from these companies. So what role do these partnerships play in expanding the ESG adoption?

Mark Blick: It's critical for us. We're a growing company. But someone like the financial institution with the scale of HSBC, and we've been working with them in Hong Kong, in the Middle East, here in America, also in the UK, allowing us to get access to thousands of companies has been really important for us. And also to reframe the conversation. People who hear me speak often, I make a joke that ESG doesn't stand for Environmental, Social and Governance. It stands for Earnings, Survival and Growth. And then you can see companies go, OK, I get this.

It isn't a compliance exercise where you need to tick a box. It is a route towards being able to win more customers, because its now sustainability reporting is often part of the standardized procurement process. So if you're a $100 million a year mid-cap manufacturer of widgets, and you want to sell into a global multinational company, often the ESG requirements or sustainability requirements are embedded in the procurement process.

But from a banking perspective, also get access to cheaper forms of capital through sustainability link loans, green finance capital. And if I can earn more through new customers, I can grow more through, I can survive more through cheaper forms of capital, I can ultimately grow.

Wall Street Frontline: Have you observed any specific sector wise trends and which sectors are leading the way, which ones are still lagging?

Mark Blick: I wouldn't say lagging. I would say in our experience, those industries that have been under this type of scrutiny for many years and sometimes decades are already pretty advanced. So as we discussed earlier, I came originally from oil and gas industry.That's an industry which has been reporting on some type of environmental sustainability indicator for a long time. So if we look at companies, typically our customers who come from natural resources, transportation, manufacturing, industrials, those types of industries which naturally have a lot of scrutiny on them already. Those tend to be the furthest forward in terms of being able to collect the data and also to have people around them who are telling them they need to report.

Wall Street Frontline: So from now on, what is your expectation for ESG adoption in the next five to 10 years?

Mark Blick: My dream, I can think I can speak of my dream. And right now, I think I don't know whether you're familiar with the psychological test. It's called the Rorschach test.

And I show you an inkblot and you think it's a butterfly and I think it's a hippopotamus and somebody else thinks it's a cloud.

Wall Street Frontline: So everybody has a different opinion on what they see.

Mark Blick: Exactly. Everybody has a different interpretation. And I think the ESG at the moment, that's what's happening. If I show it to a CFO, for them, it's around getting the regulators on site.

If I show it to somebody at a bank, it's around how do we deploy more capital through a sustainable dealing loan for a head of sustainability? It's around how do we ensure that we meet climate goals? So everybody has a slightly different view on what it is. My hope and dream is within five years, it is normalized to the extent that when the CEO or CFO is up on stage talking about their quarterly results from a revenue and a profits perspective, they're also talking about----I use this relatively mundane phrase, but non-financial risk indicators.

And that becomes a normalized part of corporate discourse where I'm going to talk about my revenue, but I'm also going to talk about my impact with regards to greenhouse gas emissions or water recycling or how I treat my employees or so on and so forth.

Wall Street Frontline: Sounds like it's a bright future. However, there are some pushbacks from investors on the Wall Street, such as Greenwash and also the Trump administration. So what is your viewpoint on these pushbacks?

Mark Blick: It certainly is happening and we see that. My viewpoint is, and I like to use this analogy from somebody, I'm going to borrow it from her, that sustainability for us, if you imagine a flow of water, it can be choppy or calm on top, but the current is always going in the same direction. So for us, yes, at the moment, we see people trying to decide sustainability.

How do I fit it within my overall corporate strategy? And I think it's really important for us that it does fit. It is integral to a company strategy and it's not a side project or it's not running parallel to a company strategy. But the overall direction of what companies are looking at in terms of resiliency, how do they future-proof their organization against external shocks? How do they gain access to new customers? How do they get access to new forms of capital? This direction, I think, is set.