Environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors are a growing concern for investors as well as society more broadly, with the rise of big, umbrella issues including financial inequality and climate change. Newfoundland and Labrador-based tech company NetBenefit Software is now offering companies an aid for their response, with software designed to identify, quantify and track ESG factors.

Starting in the Genesis Centre co-working space, NetBenefit has built on the work of Derek Gould, Carl Sheppard and the platform they launched through their company SCI Resource Software, founded in St. John’s in 2005. The company found success in offering a management system tracking socio-economic impacts from large, industrial projects. The company has worked on large resource projects in Atlantic Canada, with companies including IOC and Vale.

NetBenefit CEO Matt Adams says SCI’s founders saw a wave of new demand arriving both nationally and internationally. There was a need for broader availability, with new options in the factors examined. The SCI founders re-invested in software development and brought Adams aboard, rebranding ahead of a new platform launch as NetBenefit.

 

 

 

 

Having grown up in Ontario and living in Nashville for roughly the past four years, working in software with companies including Sphera and Intelex, Adams says the tension of the U.S. election and the pandemic had him looking at the possibility of a return to Canada. He says the decision was made a lot easier when he was introduced to the SCI founders, their existing product and what NetBenefit could come to offer. “To have something that actually sheds light on those (ESG) impacts and solves the problem of not being able to see those impacts, and is tested and true and can be applied everywhere… That’s not an opportunity you get all the time,” he told Atlantic Business Magazine.

NetBenefit has become more than the part-time effort of SCI’s founders and grown to five, full-time staff, with four people based in St. John’s and one in Toronto. The company has made rapid headway in development over roughly the past year and launched its new platform earlier this month.

There is excitement from Adams in his pitch of the NetBenefit platform as a tool for today, for transparency. He said the company has a reporting tool useful for business partnerships, reports to Indigenous governments, to municipal, provincial and federal governments and to regulators. If you’re a contractor dealing with subcontractors, who potentially then also contracts out in turn, Adams says NetBenefit can build a window into that supply chain to see the full value of a business operation.

“I think that what Derek and Carl (of SCI) have developed in both methodology and software is needed not just on the East Coast resource industry, but in many industries all over the world, and we have a really exciting opportunity to make that a reality. And it’s all starting here in St. John’s. And we’re moving very quickly, very fast. It’s very exciting.”