again at the centre of their job within five years and why, Protiviti found, climate climbed CFOs’ priority list faster than any other issue.
Producing an audit-proof carbon number is hard, specialist work, beyond what most finance teams can manage alone. So they are now leaning on a new breed of vendor, the carbon software firms that have become a kind of second auditor for emissions. Their market has swelled to US $ 28bn, growing better than a fifth a year.
The firms in front look less like environmental campaigners than like fintechs, offering the one thing finance truly wants – figures solid enough to survive an audit, wired into the systems it already uses.
None of this makes net zero simple. A bank that quits an alliance still finances what it finances; an audited target is not a target met. But the centre of gravity has moved. What began as a CEO’ s promise, delivered from a stage to applause, will live out its adulthood as a line in a spreadsheet, owned by finance, checked by an auditor, priced by a lender. The pledge, it turns out, was always the optional part. The disclosure is not.
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