Wizpresso recently partnered with the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Global Business Practicum (GBP) programme to explore how AI can accelerate compliance with Australia’s emerging climate reporting regime, particularly ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 280 (RG280) on climate-related financial disclosures.
A two-week ESG-focused internship in Hong Kong
Over an intensive two-week placement in Hong Kong, a team of five UNSW students — Lesen De Silva, Manasvi Goyal, Jamie Leong, Vincent Silang, and Han Zhu — joined Wizpresso as consulting interns through the GBP programme. The students worked closely with Wizpresso’s product and research teams to understand the fast‑evolving Australian ESG landscape and the operational challenges faced by ASX-listed companies. Their mandate was to help evaluate and enhance Wizpresso Diligence, the company’s AI-driven Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) platform, for the specific demands of RG280-aligned climate reporting.
Exploring RG280 and ASX climate disclosures
The project was grounded in the context of Australia’s mandatory climate disclosures, which are being phased in between 2025 and 2027, with the largest ASX entities reporting first. The team examined how AASB S2, the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), and ASIC’s broader regulatory guides intersect to create a complex, cross‑referenced framework that many issuers struggle to translate into audit‑ready, statutory “climate statements.” To build an evidence base, the students analysed ESG and climate reporting by leading ASX-listed companies, including BHP, BlueScope Steel, and Westpac, focusing on 2022 and 2025 annual reports and their readiness for RG280 enforcement.
Building and testing an RG280 compliance checklist
Using ASIC’s RG280 as a foundation, the team extracted and structured 214 discrete requirements into a machine‑readable checklist within Wizpresso Diligence. They then tested Diligence, already trained on ASX disclosure formats, against selected issuers to assess whether the platform could automatically determine if each requirement was fulfilled, partially fulfilled, or not fulfilled based on the companies’ public reports. This approach allowed them to quantify compliance readiness and pinpoint where disclosures were missing, fragmented across multiple sections, or misaligned with RG280’s formal expectations for climate statements and directors’ declarations.
The students’ analysis revealed that increased sustainability reporting maturity does not automatically translate into higher statutory compliance under RG280. For mature issuers such as BHP, the main challenge lay in partial alignment and fragmented presentation of required information, whereas for more transitional issuers like BlueScope Steel, the primary issue was incomplete statutory coverage and the absence of formal climate statements under AASB S2. Their findings highlighted that Diligence is particularly strong at distinguishing between narrative disclosures and statutory climate statements, performing granular regulatory mapping, and identifying implicit versus explicit compliance gaps, but also underscored the need for clearer cross‑referencing between frameworks, dynamic checklists, and prioritisation of the most critical compliance gaps.
Strengthening Wizpresso Diligence for Australian ESG
Drawing on their research, the team proposed enhancements to help Diligence adapt more effectively to the Australian market, including explicit mapping across RG280, AASB S2, the Corporations Act 2001, and other ASIC guidance; better tracking of legislative updates; and the ability to maintain historical checklists for auditability. They also recommended features to highlight requirement‑level issues, such as differentiating narrative gaps, implied alignment, and statutory non‑compliance, and flagging high‑priority items like directors’ declarations and formal climate statements. These recommendations will inform Wizpresso’s product roadmap as the company deepens its support for ASX issuers navigating mandatory climate reporting.
Wizpresso is grateful to the UNSW Global Business Practicum programme for facilitating this cross‑border collaboration and for selecting a cohort with strong analytical and ESG capabilities. The company extends its sincere thanks to Lesen, Manasvi, Jamie, Vincent, and Han for their professionalism, rigorous research, and clear final presentation, which provided actionable insights for product development and client due diligence in Australia. Wizpresso looks forward to continued engagement with UNSW and future student teams as it works to bridge global sustainability reporting requirements with AI‑powered compliance solutions.