The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) started receiving corporate sustainability data in July, launching the first phase of the long-awaited European Single Access Point (ESAP).
Announced back in 2020, ESAP is the EU’s attempt to collect all the data generated by its disclosure requirements – across 16 different directives and 19 regulations – into a single online library for financial institutions and other stakeholders.
It will “provide free, easy and centralised access to financial and sustainability information about entities and their products”, according to a recent statement from ESMA.
The first batch of data fed into the platform will come from disclosures made under the EU Short Selling Regulation, Prospectus Regulation and Transparency Directive.
For sustainability-focused investors, the Transparency Directive is key as it covers annual financial reports and, therefore, sustainability statements issued in accordance with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
Donato Calace, head of partnerships and innovation at software analytics firm Datamaran, says the creation of sustainability “data lakes” is not a new trend.
“There have been many initiatives to publicly collect information on a voluntary basis,” he says. “But ESAP – where there’s a requirement for disclosures to be undertaken in a certain way by a lot of companies and housed in one place – will be very important.”
The problem, Calace continues, is that ESAP is a piece of EU legislation, which slows the process down. “It’s taking a lot of time, so we can’t really make plans right now based on ESAP.”
However, despite the sweeping changes to CSRD’s scope and timing over the past two years, phase one “is going ahead as planned”, confirms Anna Sciortino, a senior policy officer at ESMA.
“And the data collection started the day we made the announcement [on 10 July], so we’ve started receiving the new ESAP data for the first time.”
The information is provided to ESMA by official nationally designated “collection bodies” – supervisors and private entities that already receive data directly from reporting entities as part of their existing duties under the respective laws.
Those collection bodies must now perform some brief, automated quality checks before sending that data to the ESAP within an hour of receiving it.
Once ESMA has collected “a meaningful set of EU-wide information” – which it must do by July 2027 – it will launch the official public website.
Tagging and filtering data
Phillip Blumenthal, head of sustainability at data specialist Code Gaia, says having access to lots of information in one place will enable stakeholders and peers to compare disclosures more easily.
“It’s also helpful if you’re building automated systems to capture this information,” he adds, especially when it comes to training large language models. “But this usually requires that you can access and export everything really cleanly, so if the tagging and filtering of the data isn’t good, its helpfulness is compromised.”
ESAP does not introduce any additional obligations around tagging – the practice of making reports easily machine-readable by wrapping key bits of data in standardised digital code. It relies instead on what is already required under each reporting regime.
That means sustainability submissions do not have to be tagged, because it is not yet mandated under CSRD.
However, a requirement for companies to tag their CSRD reports in accordance with XBRL – a global standard to apply computer-readable tags to data called eXtensible Business Reporting Language – is expected to be introduced imminently, now that the updated European Sustainability Reporting Standards have been approved.
From the start, ESAP will have an application programming interface, or API, which will enable external software to connect to the platform and perform automated data collection.
“There will also be a search mechanism that allows you to select the company, legislative framework or type of information you’re looking for,” says Sciortino. “And you’ll be able to see all the relevant information.”
Users will be able to download everything for free.
“There may be some limitations on certain users, if we see that usage patterns are consuming all of our processing power, for example, but we cannot anticipate that,” adds Sciortino.
Phase two
Sustainability reports for non-listed companies will be added to ESAP when the Accounting Directive is onboarded in phase two, starting in January 2028. So too will data from the EU Taxonomy, Paris-Aligned Benchmark and the ESG Ratings Regulation.
Provided the current legislative review is completed in time, the same deadline will apply for information from the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR).
The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) is scheduled to be integrated from 2029.
Phase three will include information from European Long Term Investment Funds, the Shareholder Rights Directive and the Green Bond Regulation – all in 2030.