S2:E5 | Lessons From The Front Lines - The Many Shades of ESG | Compliance In Context

Welcome back to The Securities Compliance Podcast! We have a fantastic episode ahead that shines a light on a very difficult topic—ESG.

To do this, we continue the third installment of our Lessons From the Front Lines series. Much like our regular shows, this series will provide same excellent content to help you put Compliance In Context, but will deliver that content in a more narrative form—like a fireside conversation with an industry pro. The show will focus on providing practical advice and takeaways that focus on real-life, tough lessons other industry professionals and regulators have learned on the front lines of our industry.

To help guide us through today’s conversation, we welcome in David Curran, the Chief Sustainability and ESG Officer at Paul Weiss. For anyone wanting to learn more about ESG or struggling with implementing ESG policies inside your firm’s compliance program, you won’t want to miss this episode. Listen in as David provides invaluable insights from his experiences on the front lines of the ESG space.

And if you have an idea for a future Lessons From the Front Lines episode, reach out to us on LinkedIn and Twitter or at complianceincontextpodcast.com.  We’d love to hear from you!

Interview

• Reviewing the frameworks of ESG
• How can we demysitify ESG?
• Why do firms struggle with ESG so much?
• Having a technology process to address ESG controls
• Biggest challenges in moving the ESG conversation forward
• How best to respond when you identify a deficiency
• Detailing the attitude shift on ESG in the investment management space

Quotes: 

“[I]f you are taking a position on something that you believe in, that is essential to your corporation terms of its commitment, how are you governing it is really the essential issue. So to demystify it, for example, with compliance and legal executives, is to think of it like a compliance and legal regime. Governance is governance and governance means, how do you have a policy and procedure? How do you track, measure, monitor, and report on progress against these obligations? It's not any more complicated than that.”

“[Governance] is at the core of virtually every major corporation’s business agenda today. It is not esoteric. It is not out in left field. It is existential.”

“And so the demystification is to take it into its component parts. And part of that is to disassemble ESG, look at the governance part, flip the acronym and say, ‘Whatever you’re doing in the S category, whatever you’re doing in the E category, how are you governing them?” Because if you're not governing it, it doesn't get done.”

Resources:

David Curran, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP

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