Four years in the making, the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD) officially launched on September 27, 2024.

Conceived as a disclosure and risk management framework, TISFD aims to reduce socio-economic inequality by improving transparency on corporate and investor actions that exacerbate it, while illuminating how socio-economic inequality can present risks to companies and investors. When completed, the TISFD framework will provide businesses and investors with recommendations to effectively identify, assess, and report on their socio-economic inequality impacts, dependencies, risks, and opportunities.

Background

The idea for a global inequality framework was conceived at the height of the pandemic, when regulators, investors and other market actors publicly recognized an undeniable reality: the pandemic was exacerbating inequality, which in turn was worsening the pandemic – with deep and widespread effects on the global economy. In a meeting with a major civil society organization in May 2020, Delilah Rothenberg of the Predistribution Initiative and Rights CoLab’s Cofounders Paul Rissman and Joanne Bauer saw an opportunity. In light of the successful uptake of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), they realized that a TCFD for inequality or a Taskforce on Inequality-related Financial Disclosure (TIFD) could help. They promoted the idea in an article in Responsible Investor, began a series of roundtable conversations, secured funding from The Tipping Point Fund for Impact Investing, set up an Interim Secretariat, and worked on building a coalition of diverse stakeholders to launch the Taskforce.  In 2023, the TIFD Interim Secretariat joined efforts with groups that had started a separate initiative to create a  Taskforce on Social-related Disclosure (TSFD) to form the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosure (TISFD) – a global initiative poised to reshape the investment landscape. 

A diverse global coalition – including investors, companies, civil society and labor organizations, along with the ILO, UNDP, and OECD – came together to form a Working Group with a mission to  prepare the launch of the Taskforce. Behind the scenes, members of the Working Group, including Rights CoLab, are working to determine the scope and workplan and to build an inclusive governance structure, founded on principles of co-creation, inclusivity, effective and efficient decision making, continuous improvement, and transparency.

Civil society organizations, regulators, and asset owners will be able to use the TISFD framework to evaluate the private sector’s performance and hold corporations to account. TISFD will provide a social throughline across TCFD and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and be interoperable with the major sustainability standards and serve as a knowledge partner to the standard setters – International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group. 

To learn more, visit TISFD.org.