Three-quarters of CEOs expect ESG investments to pay off after 3 to 7 years

About 72% of CEOs said it will benefit M&A (24%) and talent attraction (24%).

Singapore’s top bosses are continuing their investment in ESG, with over a third of CEOs (36%) changing the language they use to refer to ESG both internally and externally, according to KPMG’s study.

The study also showed that about one in two Singapore CEOs (52%) have fully embedded ESG into their business to create value.

The majority of CEOs in Singapore (36%) are “choosing to focus their ESG investments on governance and transparency protocols, such as best practice reporting, with less attention being paid to social and community programmes.“

Two in five CEOs said their top barrier is the lack of internal governance and controls to operationalise these goals.

Only 8% of CEOs in Singapore say that they currently have the capability and capacity to meet new reporting standards, compared with 50% in Asia Pacific and 74% globally – which means there is still some progress to be made.

One of the biggest downsides of failing to “meet the ESG expectations of stakeholders continues to be the higher cost of and difficulty in raising finance (32%).”

Follow the link for more news on

KPMG

Sustainability

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia