The Elements of Innovation Discovered
The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Bestowed two awards for 2021's Best ESG Reporting Solution Metal Tech News – November 17, 2021
Onyen took home two honors during the inaugural Canadian RegTech Awards sponsored by Ernst & Young Canada.
Eight short months after unveiling an affordable and easy-to-use environmental, social, and corporate governance reporting solution designed to meet the needs of junior and midsized mining and mineral exploration companies, Onyen Corp. has been honored with "2021's Best ESG Reporting Solution" and "Best RegTech Startup of the Year" awards by the Canadian RegTech Association.
"The entire Onyen team is honored to be recognized as 2021's Best ESG Reporting Solution and the Best RegTech Startup – awards that highlight the positive global contribution of Canadian technology companies," said Onyen founder and CEO Laurie Clark.
Sponsored by Ernst & Young Canada, the Nov. 15 inaugural Canadian RegTech Awards ceremony recognized significant achievements and innovations in the advancement of technology solutions that assist companies in meeting and improving regulatory compliance and oversight.
With the success of previous financial reporting and trading technology endeavors landing her on Canada's Top 100 Most Powerful Women list in 2017 and 2019, Clark is well respected in the male-dominated financial tech startup arena.
Having founded a total of six financial technology companies, she is best known in capital markets circles as principal of Dataphile Software Ltd, the first AI trading, clearing, and settlement system in North America. Sold to ADP NY in 2003, this innovative company, now known as Broadridge, is a world-leading financial technology provider.
She decided to apply her regulatory technology expertise to ESG reporting solutions for resource companies after a dinner conversation with longtime friend and Pelangio Exploration CEO Ingrid Hibbard.
Taking the reputation of her mineral exploration company seriously and wanting to ensure that investors and stakeholders knew it, Hibbard struggled with compiling Pelangio's ESG data into a report that met the compliance of reporting and rating agencies.
For Hibbard, the complexity of ESG reporting standards made it difficult and time-consuming for Pelangio personnel to generate a regulatory-compliant ESG report, and the costs to hire an independent firm to do it ranged from US$50,000 to US$100,000.
Clark, who was taken aback by the hefty price tag for a single report, decided to take on the challenge of creating an easy and affordable ESG reporting solution that fits the needs of small to mid-sized mining, mineral exploration, and oil and gas companies.
Thus, Onyen was born.
Unveiled at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention in March, Onyen provides an intuitive and easy-to-use online dashboard that asks the pertinent questions related to all ESG topics tracked by regulatory standards bodies – it even offers up definitions and instructions to assist users not deeply familiar with ESG terms and standards.
"We are the Tylenol," Clark told Metal Tech News earlier this year. "We have taken all the headaches away from all the mining and all the oil and gas companies."
Further alleviating the pain of generating the first ESG report, Onyen offers an analyst to assist companies' input of the initial data.
Once this first report is generated, a mining or mineral exploration company will have the ESG data that institutional and private investors are increasingly evaluating alongside the traditional geological and financial performance data considered when making investment decisions.
And the Onyen solution typically cuts 70 to 90% off the up to $100,000 price tag of ESG reporting that piqued Clark's interest in the first place. Offered on a tiered pricing system based on company size, a small resource company can enjoy large company levels of ESG reporting for as low as $7,500 per year.
In the eight months since its launch, Onyen has secured more than 30 customers to three-year terms, most of which are small- to mid-cap mining and exploration organizations based across North and South America.
It was these companies that nominated Onyen to receive the 2021's Best ESG Reporting Solution and Best RegTech Startup of the Year awards.
"We found the Onyen platform to be cost-effective and very user friendly. As a junior company with limited funds and resources, this was a great fit for us. It took complicated information and broke it down into manageable sections," Aurania Resources Ltd. penned in a nomination letter. "We are always striving to do the right thing from an ESG standpoint, and we welcome input on what we can do better – the Onyen platform highlighted what we have been doing right and helped us look at the areas in which we can improve going forward."
While honored to be awarded for the technology it has developed to peel back the layers of a complex ESG reporting process, Onyen is not resting on its laurels.
"We are committed to building on our current entrepreneurial success and to continue to offer the best customer experience to all the companies who are now part of or will be part of the Onyen family," Clark said.
With more than 16 years of covering mining, Shane is renowned for his insights and and in-depth analysis of mining, mineral exploration and technology metals.
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