Consumers and end-users

Our impact and strategy

Our role at KPMG is to strengthen public trust in information, including among consumers and end-users, who we define as the users of corporate reporting and the consumers of our clients’ goods and services. Through our ESG services, we help ensure that the sustainability information disclosed by organizations is accurate, verifiable, and trustworthy. This enables investors, lenders, consumers, and other users of this reporting to make informed decisions about the products they buy, the companies they support, and the investments they make.

KPMG’s policies are aligned with internationally recognized instruments, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. These commitments are embedded in our Global Code of Conduct and supported by due diligence processes and a grievance mechanism.

As society’s sustainability expectations continue to grow, the roles of both the auditor and the advisor remain essential. We are confident that our values empower our professionals to fulfil these roles and contribute to the change society needs, including by encouraging our people to proactively bring ESG into client conversations. Indeed, this is the foundation of one of four ESG pillars we have defined to guide our efforts, translating into tangible impact for consumers and end-users.

Our ESG pillars

Based on our DMA, we have concluded that the impact we make on sustainability in society through our ESG-related Assurance and Advisory services is a material sustainability matter for KPMG. Our ESG services have a positive impact by helping our clients to improve transparency, manage environmental and social risks, and accelerate their transition to more sustainable business models. We also consider this a financial opportunity, while recognizing that if we fail to properly address the need for sustainability support across all our services, it becomes a financial risk.

S4 Consumers and end-users	Impact materiality		Financial materiality		Value chain
Sustainability matter	Positive	Negative	Opportunity	Risk
Impact on sustainability through our services

We have embedded sustainability into our services since 1992, when KPMG first established a dedicated sustainability department. Over the past 30 years, our initial focus on environmental transparency has evolved into a comprehensive ESG approach, combining our Assurance and Advisory expertise with technical capabilities across a range of topics, including decarbonization, human rights, and ESG strategy development.

Today, KPMG aims to support clients with sustainability services in two categories: those related to reporting and those related to performance.

Services related to sustainability reporting

While the European Commission has committed to reducing regulatory reporting burdens through the Omnibus process, the societal transition toward a more equitable and environmentally sustainable economy continues. In response, we continuously enhance our services, in close collaboration with our global network, in order to maintain our frontrunner position in sustainability. For a full list of the sustainability reporting services we offer, visit our website.

Services related to sustainability performance

Sustainability transformations are no longer driven purely by compliance but, increasingly, by value. With our ESG Advisory services, we help our clients create and protect value. We are committed to supporting our clients in improving their sustainability performance, and our efforts have earned global recognition through inclusion in the Verdantix Green Quadrant 2024 and HFS Research in Horizon 2024 reports.

Our Advisory professionals work with numerous clients seeking to accelerate their progress toward their transition ambitions, as well as with clients considering their sustainability performance for the first time due to new ESG-related laws and regulations. We support companies in preparing for these requirements and in gaining insights that enhance their resilience to sustainability-related developments. Moreover, since 2022/2023, we have also include a paragraph on climate scope in our long-form audit reports on clients’ financial statements. For a full list of the sustainability performance services we offer, visit our website.

We are committed to driving meaningful, sustainable change for our clients, which in turn has a positive effect on consumers, end-users, and society. By “watermarking ESG” in everything we do, we continue to develop and apply our technical ESG expertise in combination with our strategic and reporting capabilities.

Engaging with consumers and end-users

We primarily engage with consumers and end-users about our impact on sustainability through our audit opinions and explanations of the audit process during shareholder meetings. We also engage with these groups in various ways at different stages, including before, during, and after service delivery.

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Responsibility for consumer and end-user engagement lies with Assurance and Advisory Leadership Teams. Insights from our engagement activities are discussed in quarterly ESG steering meetings and used to inform the development of our services.

We evaluate the effectiveness of our engagement through client satisfaction scores, participation rates in webinars and podcasts, and feedback collected during stakeholder roundtables. This helps us refine both our communications and our service offerings.

Reporting and remediating negative impacts

Consumers and end-users can use the channels described in the Governance information chapter to raise concerns related to our impact on sustainability in society. These channels are publicly accessible and actively monitored to identify potential negative impacts in a timely manner. We do not have a specific process for remediating negative impacts related to this sustainability matter; instead, we focus on strengthening the capabilities of our workforce to support clients by delivering ESG assurance and advisory services in line with public trust requirements.

Key policies and actions

We carry out acceptance procedures for all clients and engagements. These are essential to our organization, serving to assess the risks of accepting prospective and existing clients and engagements across all KPMG functions. The implementation of the CSRD has not yet led to changes in our client and engagement acceptance criteria.

Once an engagement is accepted, our people follow the ESG Assurance Quality Framework to ensure high-quality assurance on ESG. This framework is, in turn, supported by competence centers staffed by subject-matter experts. Our other engagement policies and procedures also guide our teams in their client-facing work, across both Assurance and Advisory.

Alongside this, we prioritize the delivery of relevant and up-to-date ESG knowledge to all our professionals, enabling them to provide our clients with high-quality insights and services. This includes training on key ESG regulations (such as the CSRD and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD)), delivered through technical education programs that are tailored to the needs of our workforce. These initiatives also equip our professionals to engage in forward-looking discussions with clients about ESG needs.

Other actions to enhance our positive impact on sustainability in society include thought leadership initiatives that promote and disseminate our ESG knowledge and stimulate change. We also published a climate letter in 2025 (the KPMG Klimaatbrief), which informs our clients about our approach to climate risk in the audit process.

In 2024/2025, we continued to collaborate with external partners to develop effective ESG solutions for clients. For example, we combine Naturalis’s biodiversity expertise with KPMG's experience in sustainability strategy and implementation, advising organizations on their impact on nature. We also work with technology providers to offer clients expertise, tooling, and solutions that enhance efficiency and effectiveness in ESG-related workflows.

Metrics, targets, and performance

We do not currently have any metrics or targets in place related to this sustainability matter. We maintain our ambition to introduce metrics in this area, and we are therefore continuing to explore how best to approach this, given that it is not yet possible for us to record ESG-related revenue in our data systems. However, we are actively working on improving the overall ESG data landscape. A significant part of this effort is the transition from source systems to our central data platform. While we already extract a large amount of data from the platform, we are in an intermediate phase where full automation is still under development. Once all relevant data is fully integrated into the platform, we will be able to leverage it for more comprehensive ESG reporting and future metric setting.