A pragmatic retreat from the 100% reuse target for straps and films Europe’s Pallet Problem and Packaging Waste Pallets are the flat, wooden workhorses of global trade. Billions of them circulate annually, bearing everything from Spanish tomatoes to Swedish flat-pack furniture. But while the pallets themselves are a model of…

Generation Z is not just interested in sustainable investing; they are treating it as a moral mandate and a pragmatic defense against a world they perceive as fundamentally unstable. This generation, fluent in financial technology and digital activism, is wielding its nascent capital and vast future wealth to dismantle the…

The ISSB was supposed to be the “Gold Standard” for climate reporting. Its latest amendments suggest it is settling for being the “Pragmatic Standard.” For the past two years, the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) has marched under a single, ambitious banner: the “Global Baseline.” The goal was to create…

For years, Europe’s financial services industry has grappled with one of MiFID II’s most ambitious, and perhaps most disruptive, reforms: the mandated separation (or “unbundling”) of payments for investment research and trade execution services. The policy, intended to eliminate conflicts of interest and ensure clients received value, inadvertently created an…

Italy’s luxury fashion houses — synonymous with heritage, precision, and timeless elegance — are facing their most profound test: ESG accountability. In 2025 alone, Tod’s, Giorgio Armani, Valentino, and Loro Piana have each come under scrutiny for alleged gaps between their ethical commitments and the realities of their supply chains.…

The European Commission has published a draft Delegated Regulation amending Delegated Regulation (EU) 2022/805, proposing new fee structures for the supervision of benchmark administrators that endorse third-country benchmarks under the oversight of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). Background Since January 2022, ESMA has directly supervised critical benchmark administrators…

The European Commission has quietly detonated a small regulatory earthquake beneath Europe’s insurers.After years of consultations, spreadsheets and actuarial wrangling, Brussels is preparing the most ambitious overhaul of Solvency II since its inception. The new Delegated Regulation, due to take effect in 2027, softens the capital straitjacket that has long…

Switzerland is not known for haste, but when it moves, it does so with precision. This week, the Federal Council opened consultation on a draft law that could reshape how the world’s biggest platforms — Facebook, X, TikTok, Google — operate within Swiss borders. The proposal is deceptively simple: make…

In the corridors of corporate disclosure, a modest shift is underway. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), a prominent standard-setter in sustainability reporting, has published a draft of its new Topic Standard “Monetary Flows” (to replace the current “Economic Performance” standard) that seeks to pull the financial curtain back across not…