How the ESG API works

The ESG API provides environmental, social, and governance data at the company level, for public and private companies worldwide.

It is composed of independent modules, each answering a different question about a company. ESG Scores grades a company's ESG performance. ESG News returns what has been reported about its ESG conduct. ESG Commitments returns what the company publicly commits to on its own website.

Common use cases

Qualify a supplier or a counterparty. Resolve your records to Veridion IDs through Match & Enrich, then request scores. The 26 risk criteria let you gate on the specific risks your policy names, such as Worker Rights or Corrupt and Unethical Transactions, rather than on the headline number alone. Read the industry quartile alongside the score: in a heavy industry where scores cluster low, a company at 57 can still be a top quartile performer, and absolute thresholds applied across mixed sectors will mislead you.

Monitor a portfolio or a supplier base for new ESG risk. Where you carry ongoing exposure to a set of companies, what matters is what has been reported since you last looked: a controversy, an incident, an enforcement action. Your own schedule drives this, calling the API again on each run. A run can ask for only the coverage published since your previous one, and can be narrowed to negative coverage, so you review what is new.

Review a single company in depth. Commitments return what the company states publicly about itself; news returns what third parties have reported. Requesting both gives you the stated position and the reported record side by side, filtered to whichever pillar or theme your review is concerned with.

Embed ESG data in your own product. Every score carries a justification and every news article and commitment carries its source URL, so you can surface the reasoning and the underlying source to your own users rather than an unexplained number.

The modules

Each module is accessed through its own endpoint and can be used entirely on its own. You do not need to consume one to use another, and each is licensed separately.

One taxonomy across every module

All ESG data is classified against a single taxonomy: three pillars (Environmental, Social, Governance), subdivided into themes, subdivided into 26 risk criteria.

The taxonomy follows the themes of the UNEP FI Principles for Sustainable Insurance, with the specific topics composed by Veridion in collaboration with members of the insurance industry. Because it is shared, a pillar, theme, or risk criterion means the same thing in every module. See ESG risk taxonomy for the full reference.

Coverage and sources

ESG data covers a broad universe of active companies worldwide, both public and private. Only first party sources are used: a company's official website, its social media profiles, news articles, and global and local legal registries.

How requests are served

ESG content is unevenly distributed across the corporate universe. A large company discloses and is written about more often. A smaller one may publish little and be covered rarely, or not at all. Refresh cadence is set deliberately against that reality, so that what is held for a company reflects how much ESG activity that company actually generates.

For the large majority of requests this means the data is already current and available, so the response comes straight back.

Where a company generates little ESG content, the API gathers and processes what it needs in response to your request. This is what keeps coverage open rather than confining you to a pre-built panel: you can ask about any company in the Veridion universe, including those far down the long tail, and get an answer instead of an empty result, where one exists.

The tradeoff is that a request is not always answered in a single round trip. Where data does need to be gathered, the API tells you it is working instead of holding your connection open, and you collect the result with a follow up call.

How long a request takes

Where nothing needs to be gathered, the response is immediate. Where data does need to be gathered, expect minutes rather than seconds. These are indicative expectations.

Pagination covers the cursor mechanism shared across the platform, including how to page a result set that is still being produced.

Company data lives elsewhere

Every ESG response identifies the company by its veridion_id. Firmographics, locations, industry classifications, and contact data are retrieved through the relevant API on the platform.

The ESG API references companies. It returns ESG data only.