The CFO’s role in driving sustainability: Oracle CSO

When it comes to driving the sustainability agenda within an organisation, the chief financial officer (CFO) plays an important role.

Jon Chorley, chief sustainability officer (CSO) at Oracle speaks to Digital Nation about how the corporate risk assessing the CFO is responsible for also helps push the sustainability agenda.

Chorley said risk was always the conversation you could have with the CFO regarding environmental sustainability.

“It would be a conversation you could have in the language of a CFO because most CFOs are responsible for some kind of corporate risk assessment. They understand the financial implications of that, they understand that sometimes you have to take out insurance against that, it was a natural way to have that conversation,” he said.

Chorley said there's a great deal of regulatory pressure on reporting environmental matters, which is closely aligned with traditional financial reporting.

“The alignments between those CSO roles and the CFO roles are strengthening, largely because of the sustainability reporting legislative requirements,” he explained.

Chorley said there is a need for CFOs to have more skills and understanding of sustainability.

“What's happening is a broadening into environmental, social and governance, that creates a very broad umbrella. It includes environmental factors, social factors and other governance-related factors,” he said.

The broadening also welcomes new skills Chorley said. For example, an ESG controller would be a new role that could report holistically against these new measures.

“There's no question that there's a need for coordination across the organisation around these kinds of ESG and sustainability-related matters, and for specific skills to help manage that,” he added.

Chorley explained that ESG is a set of things that now influences what you do in your daily work, and therefore needs to be embedded in the processes that run the business.

“Albeit with some additional assistance to make sure you're on the right track and using the right policies. But at the end of the day, somebody is selecting a supplier, procurement is selecting a supplier,” he said.

“They need to be informed about how to do so with a sustainable or ESG related lens. They're the ones running that process and they need the help to run that process with that additional consideration.”