For companies inside EcoVadis' sustainability rating network, employee misconduct reporting requires a hotline that works in Lagos and Dhaka as reliably as in London. Renewing that infrastructure is the substance of a deal struck this week between EcoVadis and BICS, the Proximus Global subsidiary that has been providing cloud communications services to the ratings platform for three years.
EcoVadis rates 175,000 companies across 180 countries on four dimensions: environment, labour and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. Its methodology is aligned to UN Global Compact, GRI, and ISO 26000 standards. For a company to achieve a high EcoVadis score on ethics, it must demonstrate that employees and external partners have a secure, confidential channel for reporting misconduct. That means the channel has to be reachable from markets with complex telecom environments.
BICS provides the cloud and mobile numbering infrastructure and international voice termination that underpins EcoVadis' whistleblowing hotlines, customer support operations, and sustainability surveys. The extended agreement maintains that service and opens the door to international messaging transit, which both parties intend to explore as the next phase of the partnership.
Jaymy Teh, VP of Go-To-Market Strategy and Telco Solutions at Proximus Global, said: "We are immensely proud that through BICS' cloud communications and voice services, we provide the backbone for the essential work EcoVadis is doing in the ESG space. The continuation of this partnership proves that trusted international communication capabilities are essential for critical use cases. By delivering reliable connectivity for hotlines and surveys, we are helping to power crucial social responsibility efforts across international and hard-to-reach markets."
Konstantinos Lentas, Senior Telecom Engineering Manager at EcoVadis, said: "Human rights due diligence depends on trust at scale. For three years, BICS has kept our engagement tools, surveys, and hotlines running reliably worldwide, including in the hardest-to-reach markets. That reliability lets us focus on what we do best: building the technology that brings worker voices into supply chains everywhere."
BICS is a Proximus Group company and operates across more than 180 countries.
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