Responsible Sourcing and Supply Chain Management

Our commitment to responsible business extends to our supply chain. We carefully manage and collaborate with our extensive global network of suppliers, ensuring legal and regulatory compliance, ethical behavior, supplier diversity and environmental sustainability. These efforts not only benefit our business and suppliers, but also help to safeguard our brand and reputation.

Our approach to responsible sourcing covers several areas, including how we engage our key suppliers from initial screening to when we may need to exit a relationship, how we codify our expectations through various policy and contractual instruments, how we build the infrastructure to monitor and track risks and performance, and how we use data-driven insights to better understand our supply chain and inform our actions. Our Procurement Sustainability team collaborates with teams across the company to make progress in these areas. This enables us to connect our supply chain sustainability program to our material topics.

S&P Global’s Vendor Code of Conduct (VCOC) is provided to all suppliers and outlines the principles, guidelines and standards we expect them to adhere to, including conducting their business responsibly and with integrity, and fully complying with applicable laws and regulations. The issues addressed by the VCOC include ethical business conduct, data security and confidentiality, child and involuntary labor, racism and discrimination, wages and benefits, fair treatment, employee health and safety, and environmental stewardship. Suppliers are also expected to abide by the provisions of our Global Human Rights Policy and UK Modern Slavery Act Statement. Penalties for noncompliance may include temporary sanctions or losing an S&P Global account.

For information on other material topics connected with our supply chain, see Human Rights; Community and Economic Impact; and Energy and Climate Change.

Our responsible sourcing team works to continually update and enhance our policies, procedures and tools to integrate environmental and social considerations in the procurement process. In 2024, we prioritized several actions to increase efficiency and further embed sustainability in our day-to-day decision-making, including:

• Updating our internal Vendor Sourcing and Procurement Policy to streamline processes and further codify our commitments to human rights and environment in the context of procurement.
• Improving our Supplier Questionnaire and formally integrating it into our online vendor management system, allowing for automated scoring of supplier responses to enhance data collection and engagement.
• Enabling business-unit-level reporting to support enhanced insights, accountability and decision-making.
• Launching a new Vendor Management Dashboard to consolidate critical metrics on supplier performance (see box below).

Engagement with our suppliers is essential to the promotion of proactive risk management and advancement of our supply chain sustainability program. Through dialogue, we address concerns, share best practices and work together to achieve shared social and environmental goals. In 2024, we partnered with Green Project Technologies, a carbon accounting and ESG data management platform provider, to conduct a series of webinars to help suppliers advance their climate-related efforts. These sessions targeted over 220 suppliers and focused on essential topics such as measuring greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and developing science-based targets. As a result, we gained additional insight into the GHG accounting and target-setting efforts of several suppliers.

S&P Global also actively participates in external industry groups and initiatives focused on supply chain issues. For example, in 2024, we joined the Sustainable Procurement Pledge’s League of Champions, which brings together leaders from some of the world’s biggest organizations to fund and enable collaborative approaches to shared challenges. In addition, a representative of S&P Global currently serves on the board of the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council.