Post by Benjamin Kuenlen

✨ I am proud to share that I have successfully completed my Bachelor’s Thesis in International Business Management at Hochschule Fresenius, with a final grade of 1.0. I am especially grateful to my first examiner/ supervisor Prof. Dr. Stefan Gewald and my second examiner Prof. Dr. Barbara Scharrer for their invaluable support and guidance. 🔍 My thesis explored the question:  How do the new ESG Rating Regulation and the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) improve the comparability, transparency, and practical feasibility of ESG requirements for companies in the financial and industrial sectors? Writing this thesis was both an academic and personal journey. It allowed me to dive deeply into ESG, a topic often only touched on the surface in International Business Management. I realised how complex and relevant ESG is, not just for companies but for society as a whole. Most of all, I take away a stronger sense of how important transparency and long-term thinking are in today’s economy, and how much I enjoy exploring the intersection of business ethics and policy. If you're curious to dive deeper, here are some key insights from my research: - Harmonisation: CSRD introduces mandatory, standardised ESG reporting (ESRS), while the ESG Rating Regulation improves oversight of rating providers.     - Transparency: Double materiality, digital tagging, and external assurance strengthen disclosure quality. Cases like DWS and BMW show transparency is now both a compliance duty and a reputational factor.     - Sectoral contrasts: Financial firms face rating inconsistencies; industrial firms struggle with Scope 3 emissions and supply chain reporting. SMEs remain especially burdened.     - Persistent gaps: Methodological differences between rating agencies and rising bureaucracy undermine comparability. Risks of greenwashing, greenhushing, and greenwishing remain.     - Recommendations: To increase effectiveness, ESG regulation should (1) allow greater sector-specific flexibility, (2) push rating agencies toward methodological alignment, and (3) provide SMEs with clearer, more accessible audit and reporting standards.     📌 Conclusion: The EU’s new ESG rules, CSRD and the ESG Rating Regulation, are an important step toward harmonised and more transparent reporting. Yet the outcomes are mixed: comparability has improved in law but not fully in practice, transparency has increased but comes with risks of greenwashing and overreporting, and practical feasibility remains the biggest hurdle, especially for SMEs and industrial firms. What’s your view? Do these reforms make ESG reporting more trustworthy or just more complex?