Mosaic Financial Services Infrastructure has struck a deal with Australasian niche consultant business, Informed.City, to offer climate-reporting services to the NZ market.
Under the arrangement confirmed this week, Mosaic and Informed.City will provide a “comprehensive suite of services” designed around the recently introduced NZ climate-reporting obligations.
Mosaic says in a joint release: “Together, our partnership with Informed.City deepens our ability to service our clients’ climate-related needs by scaling up the analysis and implementation of key building blocks needed for the disclosure regime and beyond.”
Urban data-gatherer, researcher and climate governance consultancy, Informed.City, was founded in Australia in 2019 by long-established specialists in the field, Donovan Burton and Ian Edwards.
The group has advised clients in the “financial, corporate and government sectors” in NZ as well as Australia.
“Our economy requires transformational change, and significant opportunities can be found by leaning into the challenge,” Burton said in the release. “It is exciting to be working with Mosaic and collectively we look forward to helping firms to integrate a meaningful response to these complex issues.”
About 200 NZ entities including banks, insurers, most NZX-listed companies and the majority of licensed fund managers now have to comply with climate-related disclosure standards that came into force last year.
The law does allow some phase-in exemptions but the reporting complexity is due to increase as the rules ultimately require assured quantitative greenhouse gas measures to be included.
In a paper published this month, Mosaic principal consultant, Mathieu Hemery, and principal, Tracey Berry, said the industry had learnt much during the first year of compulsory climate-reporting but:
“It is important though to note that it is not ‘complete’: adoption provisions ending will present some of the most complex problems (namely quantification of current and anticipated impacts, transition planning, scope 3 emissions); as too will monitoring progress against targets and adequacy of processes requiring entities to embrace continuous improvement.”
NZ was the first country to introduce mandatory climate-reporting legislation in 2021 but several other jurisdictions including the UK have since followed suit with more in the pipeline. Earlier in March, for instance, the US Securities Exchange Commission adopted a final climate-reporting set of rules while a draft law, similar to the NZ version, entered the Australian parliament last week.
In November 2023, the External Reporting Board (XRB) – the government body responsible for setting the climate-reporting standards – said it was closely watching international developments in the area.
“We have committed to beginning a post-implementation review of NZ CS [climate standards] by December 2025,” the XRB said at the time. “One aspect of that review will be to determine whether there is any need to modify NZ CS to further align with any existing or forthcoming requirements adopted by other relevant jurisdictions.”
Mosiac is the largest specialist financial services technology consultancy firm in NZ, covering banking, insurance, funds management and other associated sectors.