Minimum teams up with Nasdaq to help thousands of US companies manage emissions data

We're excited to share that Minimum has expanded its US operations through a strategic partnership with Nasdaq — see press release [1] and features in The New York Times [2], Carbon Pulse [3], and Carbon Herald [4]. This collaboration will focus on helping publicly listed companies in the United States streamline their emissions data reporting, especially in light of new regulations from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that will impact approximately 3,700 publicly listed companies in the USA. This SEC regulation reflects a global trend towards more stringent environmental regulation, with the European Union, for example imposing increasingly strict sustainability reporting requirements on around 50,000 companies.

Nasdaq’s ESG Advisory team are front-runners in helping companies navigate this challenge with world-class expertise and hands-on support. We’re proud that Nasdaq has teamed up with Minimum, the market-leading Emissions Data Platform, to ensure their clients have a smooth start to their carbon management journey and are well-equipped to handle future challenges around decarbonization, audit, and increased scrutiny from regulators, investors, and customers.

The carbon emissions data challenge sits at the heart of all corporate carbon management

98% of publicly-listed businesses in the US say they plan to comply with this SEC regulation in advance of its release. The problem is that carbon reporting, and corporate decarbonisation more broadly, depends entirely on having good quality carbon data. Unfortunately, surfacing and managing this carbon data has traditionally proven to be a significant pain for businesses, especially for large, complex Enterprises, for many reasons:

• Data is spread widely across the organisation — living in disparate systems, in the hands of a range of stakeholders across business silos or, in the case of Scope 3 footprint, inside adjacent businesses such as suppliers or investments. This data needs to be identified, consolidated, cleansed & tidied on a regular basis.
• It’s challenging for a non-specialists to calculate robust carbon footprints — especially if the business has a non-standard structure or is engaging in activities with a difficult-to-calculate carbon footprint.
• Once the footprint is calculated, high quality emissions data needs to be made available across the organisation — in a way that’s detailed & nuanced enough to use for the purposes of decarbonization, defensible to auditors, and easy to update or even re-baseline in future.

Minimum’s Emissions Data Platform (EDP) is very specifically designed to solve all of these problems in the Enterprise context, making it easier for companies to not just comply with increasing regulations but also make data-driven decisions to reduce their emissions effectively and make the ‘carbon emissions data headache’ a thing of the past.

Carbon emissions data needs a System of Record - this will be the major corporate ‘digital transformation’ project of the 2020s

This type of data challenges is not new for enterprises. In fact, over the last 30 years large organisations have systematically executed huge ‘digital transformations’ as they’ve sought to digitise & automate manual processes, centralise disparate data into single systems, and use technology to improve their business operations. The software that helps organisations is often referred to as ‘Systems of Record’, and many of these software solutions have become essential infrastructure for modern enterprises (and have become household names in the process):

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, such as SAP or Oracle, that runs swathes of corporate operations
• General Ledger (GL) software, such as Sage or Netsuite, for financial bookkeeping
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, such as Salesforce, for coordinating customer relationships
• Human Resources Information System (HRIS) software, such as ADP or Workday

These systems provide a single-source-of-truth for their respective data, enabling streamlined, low-latency data collection & ingestion, strong data consistency & integrity, and improved decision-making & data-accessibility.

Carbon is irrefutably the latest (and, as of 2023, the most important!) new data challenge for businesses to grapple with. To survive in the 2020s, it is essential for organisations to have a single-source-of-truth for their carbon data: they need it to meet compliance requirements, and they need it to make informed strategic decisions concerning decarbonization. It should come as no surprise, then, that businesses desperately need a new form of System of Record to help them manage their carbon data.

Minimum’s platform solves the carbon data challenge

Minimum’s Emissions Data Platform is providing this Enterprise System of Record for emissions data. Our software enables clients and partners, such as Nasdaq, to say goodbye to unmaintainable, unauditable, manually-collated Excel spreadsheets or legacy systems, and start their journey towards a world in which their carbon data is centralised, accessible, auditable, and highly-robust.

This infrastructure is essential for businesses to be future proof in the face of ever-advancing legislation, as well as giving them the decision-grade data they need to take effective climate action. That is why Nasdaq see Minimum’s platform as the perfect foundation through which they can support their clients on their climate journey - providing a unified emissions data baseline for reporting, decarbonisation & target-setting, and integration into broader ESG strategy and planning.

About us

Minimum was founded by ex-consultants from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and has been designed specifically for the kinds of global enterprise clients BCG serves. Drawing on decades of combined experience in carbon management within our team, from consultancies such as The Carbon Trust and South Pole, we have invested years of significant R&D into our product. By also collaborating closely with the most respected carbon consultancies, we have ensured that Minimum’s Emissions Data Platform meets the requirements of even the most discerning specialists and is truly appropriate to solve the ever-evolving emissions data requirements for the world’s largest corporates.

[1] Press Release

[2] New York Times

[3] Carbon Pulse

[4] Carbon Herald