Penbox

About Penbox

Penbox is a B2B SaaS company which streamlines customer data collection and reduces the back-and-forth of email exchanges for insurance brokers and service businesses across France and Belgium. Founded in late 2019, Penbox now reduces the administrative burden of more than 350 major insurance companies, insurance brokers and service companies.

The challenge

As one of the leading insurtechs on the Belgian market, Penbox has a large matrix of investors, customers and internal stakeholders who require ESG data collection on a broad range of metrics. They have two investors, one of which, Fortino Capital, requires them to report on SFDR principle adverse impact indicators (PAIs) for its Article 9 Fund. Penbox’s customers are in highly regulated sectors such as insurance and financial services and therefore have very stringent governance reporting requirements. Finally, Penbox itself prioritises gender diversity and equality which are typically a challenge in the technology sector. Led by its Chief Executive, Emile Fyon, Penbox is always looking to increase and improve the data they have around ESG performance so that they can enhance their communication to all stakeholders on this topic.

The solution

Due to the variety of stakeholders that Penbox works with, they have used four different ESG platforms so far. CEO Emile Fyon, said of KEY ESG:

“Of the four platforms we have used for ESG reporting, KEY ESG is the most engaging and educational: you understand why you need to provide the data and how to gather it.”

Emile describes the data collection process with KEY ESG’s platform as “very efficient” and said: “it helped us to understand how we score on dimensions that are important to us and where we can differentiate as a tech company, such as gender equality and diversity.”

Emile detailed that using KEY ESG’s platform has helped them stay focussed on the importance of diversity in the senior management team and revealed that they score very well on gender pay gap. The data gathered on the platform supports Penbox’s recruitment processes, both in attracting the right talent and ensuring that they address senior management team diversity where possible.

What’s next

Emile explained that thanks to the educational elements of KEY ESG’s platform, and the “estimators” which allow companies to get a ballpark figure of their ESG performance based on input-output tables, the whole business has become much more engaged with ESG reporting. In 2024, they hope to build on this and complete their reporting on a regular, quarterly basis. This will improve their data accuracy and also bring the topics to the top of the board agenda more often. Having accurate ESG data will enable them to see where they lag behind and need to concentrate, and also identify their strengths which they should maximise and build into business strategy.