Pollen Street Capital

About Pollen Street Capital

Pollen Street Capital is a purpose-led asset manager, driving business transformation and long-term sustainable investment performance. The company helps firms within the technology, financial, and business services sectors to reach their full potential.

Pollen Street has been focussed on ESG since the firm was established in 2013. The firm is a founding member of the EDCI (ESG Data Convergence Initiative) and is committed to integrating ESG into its practices. The team have been working on implementing a full Scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon accounting solution, which would improve sustainability while creating strong value for stakeholders in the long-term.

The Challenge

Under the EU SFDR, Pollen Street has committed to Article 8 for current PE and Credit funds, and is working to align processes and disclosures with Article 8 requirements across all future funds. Detailed carbon accounting and PAI reporting capabilities are therefore required to meet ESG disclosure demands from regulators and investors.

As Pollen Street has continued to grow, and with the ever-increasing scrutiny on ESG from all stakeholders including LPs and regulatory bodies, it has become imperative to make the ESG management process as streamlined as possible for Pollen Street Capital, its portfolio companies and borrowers.

The portfolio comprises fast-growing, middle-market businesses which may have limited time and resource to manage ESG. The focus for these businesses is to streamline their reporting and remove manual data processes as much as possible.

To address this, Pollen Street began to look for new and innovative ways to automate their processes and improve their accuracy by enabling their portfolio companies to collect ESG data easily and efficiently and communicate it through a centralised dashboard.

KEY ESG’s Solution

KEY ESG’s software offers full carbon accounting data collection and calculation solutions for Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. In centralizing ESG data from various systems, KEY ESG saved Pollen Street’s portfolio a significant amount of time, while simultaneously preventing errors through automated calculations and reporting.

The onboarding process took just over a month, and involved a mixture of 1-1 onboarding sessions between KEY ESG specialists and the portfolio companies, and group workshops. The software enables multi-user collaboration which allows portfolio companies to collect data from different global regions and business units seamlessly.

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Alison Collins, Head of ESG, said:

“KEY ESG enabled Pollen Street to centralize all portfolio carbon data in one platform. The rapid onboarding allowed all our companies to collect and report on the required SFDR emissions data within 6 weeks.

We could not have moved this fast without KEY ESG. Our portfolio companies love how easy to use the platform is and have already mentioned they want to use it for their own internal ESG processes.”

What’s next?

KEY ESG’s software has increased the accuracy and speed at which ESG data is gathered. With a robust reporting system in place, Pollen Street has been able to set data-driven targets for next year. These insights, along with KEY ESG’s specialist guidance, have allowed Pollen Street’s portfolio companies to spend less time reporting and more time effecting positive change.

Pollen Street Capital and KEY ESG are looking at more ways that we can work together as KEY ESG expands its offering. Our strong partnership has allowed us to collaborate on the dashboard functionality developments and product roadmap planning. Both KEY ESG and PSC look forwards to benefiting from this collaboration as we move into 2024 and beyond.

Head of ESG, Alison Collins concluded:

“We were in search of a platform that could support this data-driven approach to ESG management to make our existing ESG processes even more efficient and effective. KEY ESG helps us further accelerate our ESG ambitions.”

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