August 20, 2025

A blog post by Mayank Agarwal, Brian Jobe, Yolaine Kermarrec, and Beth Kaplan

In today’s business landscape, sustainability reporting is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s fast becoming a core responsibility of the controllership function, tasked with navigating an increasingly complex web of regulations while balancing the imperative to create value for the organization.

This evolution requires more than meeting compliance deadlines—it demands strategic thinking, robust data models, and the foresight to build systems that not only satisfy today’s requirements but also prepare the organization for the regulatory landscape of tomorrow. When done well, sustainability reporting can become a source of operational efficiency, business resilience, and competitive advantage.

The driving forces behind the sustainability transition

The pressure for more robust sustainability reporting is growing from all directions—regulators, investors, customers, and even employees. While many organizations focus on compliance as the immediate driver, the true opportunity lies in using sustainability data to inform strategic and operational decision-making, shaping better long-term outcomes.

The transition from regulatory necessity to value creation follows a clear path:

How sustainability creates shareholder value

When integrated strategically, sustainability initiatives can deliver measurable benefits across multiple value drivers, including:

At the heart of effective sustainability reporting is one critical factor: data quality.

For many organizations, sustainability data is incomplete, fragmented, and often stored across multiple systems. This leads to reliance on rough estimates or industry averages—an approach that would be unthinkable in many areas of finance and accounting. After all, no one would measure liquidity by multiplying industry average ratios of cash float for the industry multiplied by revenue. Sustainability metrics deserve the same rigor.

Organizations that succeed in this area share a common trait: They invest in robust, well-controlled data foundations that are:

• Actionable: Driving real business decisions rather than serving as window dressing.
• Reliable: Enabling accurate measurement of progress and accountability.
• Scalable: Allowing a “source once, use many” approach across multiple reporting needs.
• AI-ready: Structured and consistent enough to support emerging Generative AI applications for analytics, forecasting, and scenario planning.

The strategic imperative for controllership

For the controllership function, the sustainability reporting challenge is a distinct opportunity. By building integrated, forward-looking reporting models, controllership teams can:

Meet evolving compliance requirements with efficiency.

Provide leaders with high-confidence data for strategic decision-making.

Enable value creation across revenue, cost, and risk dimensions.

Position the organization to thrive in a future where sustainability is inseparable from performance.

In short, sustainability reporting done well isn’t just about compliance—it’s about creating the conditions for long-term value and resilience. For finance leaders, that’s not just a responsibility. It’s a competitive edge. To explore additional strategic imperatives for leveraging sustainability reporting to drive more value, including real-world use cases across the controllership function, listen to our webcast on demand: Sustainability reporting: Optimizing organizational value for controllership