The adoption of the European Commission’s Recommendation of the Voluntary Sustainability Reporting Standard for SMEs (VSME) on the 30th July 2025, is an important step forward in facilitating the requests for sustainability information that SMEs have to tackle from large companies and financial institutions.
The template which was developed by EFRAG will help the collection of relevant data points and ensure that larger companies and financial institutions do not demand more data than what can be reasonably obtained by SMEs in order for them to comply with the mandatory reporting under the EU Directive 2022/2464 Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
European Family Businesses (EFB) thanks the European Commission and EFRAG for their efforts in developing these voluntary reporting requirements with the aim to reduce reporting.
Moreover, we would like to highlight that there is potential for this voluntary standard to be seen an opportunity for those companies that are not are not subject to the CSRD and the information requests from larger companies as it gives them a rare opportunity to prepare at their own pace and gather information regarding the requested data points that banks and investors often look. Not only will this boost their competitiveness in the long-run, but it will also allow them to assess how to become more sustainable.
We look forward to seeing how the VSME reporting standard will help businesses.