There’s an article doing the rounds in the accounting trade press this week, off the back of HLB International’s ESG Forum at the ICAEW in July. The thrust of it is that ESG has stopped being a regulatory tickbox and become a strategic lever, and that as the conversation moves from “how do we comply” to “how does an ESG strategy contribute to long-term growth,” the services accountants and advisers provide have to evolve with it.
Fair enough. But read between the lines and the real story isn’t really about accountants discovering ESG. It’s about accountants discovering their clients got there first.
Look at the procurement number buried in the piece. Two thirds of procurement professionals now say ESG is an important part of their company strategy, and more than half already have a sustainable and ethical procurement policy in place. Read that again. This isn’t a niche pocket of sustainability specialists. This is procurement, the most pragmatic, margin-obsessed function in any business, telling you governance and sustainability criteria are now baked into who they buy from. That’s not virtue signalling. That’s two thirds of an entire profession changing the rules of who gets a contract.
Which means everybody should be getting this by now. Not “should be thinking about it eventually.” Should be getting it, today, because the people who write the purchase orders already have.
And you can see it playing out commercially, not just in policy documents. Take a company like Origina, which builds its whole business on third-party support for enterprise software rather than forcing clients onto an endless upgrade treadmill. Sweat the asset you’ve already paid for instead of replacing it before its time. Less hardware churn, less waste, better governance over what you’re actually running and why, and capital that isn’t being burned on forced upgrades gets freed up to invest in people instead of vendors. I constantly raise this with partners and clients as an absolutely key value lever, not a side benefit. That’s why I love supporting Tomás and the leadership team at Origina, because they’re helping clients meet real ESG goals through the asset decisions they were already making, not bolting sustainability on as an afterthought.
So the gap isn’t conviction. The same piece quotes a UN study finding eighty per cent of SMEs recognise sustainability as a real issue, and only eight per cent are actually reporting on it. That’s not a belief problem. Everybody already believes it.
It’s a translation problem. The procurement department gets it. The commercially switched-on operators like Origina get it and are building entire propositions around it. The client, increasingly, gets it. The bit that’s catching up is the advisory layer in between, still offering compliance frameworks to clients who’ve already moved on to asking what their ESG position does for growth, capital access, and talent.
There’s a familiar shape to that, if you’ve listened to me at all on The Third Half. The professionals at the cutting edge of an industry rarely get caught out by not knowing. They get caught out by knowing and still selling the old service because that’s the one they’ve always sold. Same instinct that keeps a person doing the job that made them successful for a decade after it stopped fitting who they are.
The forum in July is accountants trying to close that gap before the market closes it for them. Worth watching whether they manage it before procurement and the Originas of this world finish writing the new rules without them.
People. Planet. Progress.