Industry and finance: towards an extra-financial data infrastructure
Extra-financial data is still too often approached as a reporting exercise. A constraint to satisfy, a document to produce, an obligation to check. In fact, it nevertheless carries much more strategic information: it describes how a company operates, is part of its value chain, and copes with shocks. In industrial sectors, and in particular in BITD, this reality is particularly visible. The ability to understand, structure and exploit this data directly conditions the readability of companies for financial actors. This change of perspective involves moving from declarative logic to infrastructure logic.
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Extra-financial data describes the robustness of the company
Treating extra-financial data as a reporting subject is a fundamental error. We work a lot with BITD players, and this shows how unsuitable this approach is for industrial companies.
Extra-financial data makes it possible to describe the way in which a company operates, resists and adapts in its environment.
Analyzing it is equivalent to qualifying:
Critical Dependencies and Exhibitions
- Critical dependencies (suppliers, materials, technologies),
- Geopolitical exhibitions,
Vulnerabilities and resilience capacities
- Operational Vulnerabilities
- security and continuity devices.
This information describes the real strength of the business.
Data that is still difficult to use
This information requires a structured data model to be used with confidence.
However, in many companies, this data is still mostly managed in Excel files, stored in non-sovereign environments and without a stable structure over time.
This results in a lack of a common data model, a duplication of information, a loss of traceability and an inability to reconstruct the history of decisions.
Applying finance standards to extra-financial matters
A financial system is based on:
- a unique database,
- Explicit Management Rules
- and complete traceability.
This level of requirement now applies to extra-financial data. Because without this structure, data becomes:
- unreliable,
- Hard to share,
- Expensive to produce,
- Unusable for critical uses such as financing or insurance.
In BITD, an issue directly linked to financing
In BITD, this lag becomes structuring.
The work carried out by Sabine Lochmann within the Eurodefense-France working group shows that the central challenge lies in the readability of companies for financial actors: the information exists, but it is presented in a fragmented manner and remains difficult to interpret in a financing logic.
Key information:
- positioning in the value chain,
- critical dependencies,
- risk concentration,
- Resilience Capacity
Financing industrial sovereignty means making this data usable.
This is based on an infrastructure capable of defining a stable data model, of managing access rights, of ensuring the traceability of changes, of guaranteeing the sovereignty of the hosting and of exposing the data without duplicating it.