home
frankly speaking podcast

#44 Filip Gregor: How Should Companies Undertake a Materiality Assessment?

Listen to Filip Gregor, Head of Frank Bold’s Responsible Companies section and member of EFRAG’s Sustainability Reporting Board

In this Frankly Speaking episode, we explore how companies should undertake a materiality assessment when they tackle their sustainability report. The concept of materiality is derived from financial accounting in business and human rights, and very simply asks the question: does this information matter?

To guide us, we welcome back ⁠Filip Gregor⁠, head of ⁠Frank Bold’s Responsible Companies section⁠ and member of EFRAG’s Sustainability Reporting Board, which draws up and recommends the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).

In this episode, you’ll hear more about: 

  • How materiality is done in the ESRS and what does double materiality mean
  • How companies should start to think about assessing and measuring impact materiality
  • The logic behind the "traffic light" system for risk assessment in ⁠EFRAG's draft guidance on Materiality Assessment⁠
  • Filip’s advice to companies that want to better understand financial materiality
  • What is the role of the stakeholder in relation to the materiality question

“The most fundamental change is that the EU Sustainability Reporting Standards require companies to apply specific criteria for assessing impacts and specific criteria for assessing financial effects. Those criteria are not opinions of their stakeholders. So when it comes to the impact, those criteria are the same as the criteria for the salient human rights issues, being the severity and likelihood of actual, respectively, potential impacts for the financial relevance, sustainability related risks and opportunities. Those are the criteria of the magnitude of financial effects on the company and the likelihood. That’s the most important one there.“

Filip Gregor in Frankly Speaking

You may also like these episodes

36:49

#117 How Businesses Can Combat Modern Slavery: Professor John Dumay

What can businesses do to eliminate modern slavery? Listen to Johannes Dumay, Professor in Accounting at Macquarie University

35:59

#116 Simon Rawson: Is Inequality a Risk to Business? Inside the TISFD Framework

The Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD) wants to do for social issues what the TCFD did for climate a decade ago: harness capital markets to drive corporate action, this time on inequality and people-related risk.

31:41

#115 Sarah Hechler & Christopher Bayer: How Well Are German Companies Doing HREDD?

What’s the track record of German companies implementing the LkSG? Listen to Sarah Hechler, previously Social Project Manager at the UN Global Compact Netzwerk Deutschland, and Christopher Bayer, Senior Researcher on the study and Principal Investigator at Development International