For large institutional asset owners, ESG reporting pressure rarely accumulates evenly across the year. Instead, it concentrates sharply, most visibly in Q2, when regulatory deadlines, internal governance and committee cycles, audit preparation, and external disclosures converge. This convergence compresses review windows and increases operational risk at precisely the point where scrutiny is highest.
This compression is not accidental. It reflects how ESG reporting has evolved over time. Reporting obligations have expanded rapidly across asset classes, jurisdictions, and data granularities, while many underlying operating models still assume annual, document-based collection rather than continuous, portfolio-level data management. As a result, workload and decision-making are pushed late in the cycle, regardless of effort earlier in the year.