Why your company may be hiring an ‘ESG Controller’

Here’s the intro from this Fortune article:

Some major companies aren’t waiting until the passage of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed climate-risk disclosure rule to add the right finance talent for ESG reporting. They’re creating new roles.

Regarding ESG (environmental, social, and governance), I conducted a job search on LinkedIn under “ESG finance” and “ESG controller” to see what I would find. Citi, one of the largest banks in the U.S., is seeking an ESG disclosures controller—a new role in the company’s finance/controller function. The person would be “responsible for oversight of ESG-related disclosures in our financial and reporting processes for Citi’s SEC filings, as well as information contained in Citi’s publicly available ESG reports,” according to the LinkedIn post. A master’s degree or a CPA is preferred. Meanwhile, Cisco Systems has several openings for an ESG finance leader to report to the ESG controller.

The role of ESG controller is different from sustainability officers because ESG controllers can bring the “experience and diligence that the company has developed around financial information to non-financial disclosures,” according to a recent report by Wes Bricker, PwC vice chair and U.S. Trust Solutions co-leader.