How BBGI Transformed Sustainability Reporting Across a Global Infrastructure Portfolio

Background

BBGI is a global infrastructure investment company that invests in and actively manages essential infrastructure through a responsible investment approach.

Its steadily growing portfolio spans Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia, and includes social and transport infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, civic infrastructure, affordable housing and renewable energy assets. These assets provide essential services that communities rely on every day but rarely need to think about.

BBGI’s business model is characterised by long-term, availability-based concession investments, with revenues typically underpinned by government-backed contracts. This provides predictable, long-duration cash flows and resilience across economic cycles.

BBGI adopts an active asset management approach, combining financial investment with operational oversight and governance. The company works closely with project companies and public sector clients to maintain asset performance over the full lifecycle of each project, with BBGI directors represented on the boards of portfolio companies. This approach supports stable income generation while preserving asset value and operational resilience over time.

Responsible investment is integrated across BBGI’s portfolio investment cycle, with an emphasis on the long-term performance and sustainability of its assets. This includes material sustainability topics such as health and safety, climate risk, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy efficiency, environmental impact, community impact, governance and business ethics.

Within this framework, climate change is a key focus area, given its potential impact on operating costs and long-term asset resilience. BBGI has set GHG emissions targets to reduce Corporate Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions by 50% by 2030 and to achieve net zero by 2040. The company is also addressing indirect emissions linked to its investments by implementing decarbonisation plans across its portfolio.

Challenge

Before turning to Sweep, BBGI faced challenges in managing sustainability data across more than 50 assets. The scale and geographic spread of the portfolio made the fully manual, spreadsheet- and email-based data collection process increasingly difficult to manage. This also limited BBGI’s ability to consistently monitor governance practices and social factors across its portfolio, such as health and safety, board diversity and engagement with local communities.

Each reporting cycle required the consolidation of hundreds of files, with multiple datasets collected for each asset. As files grew in size and complexity, performance issues became frequent, with calculations sometimes taking several minutes to process. The overall process, from survey preparation to final consolidation, was time-consuming and resource-intensive. The reliance on manual processes also introduced a risk of errors, raising challenges around data consistency and reliability of information.

To manage the workload, BBGI engaged external consultants to support data consolidation and provide emission factor databases. This added cost but delivered limited strategic value, and inconsistencies in emission factors led to results that were difficult to interpret and explain over time.

The system provided limited capacity for trend analysis or portfolio-level insights, as most effort was focused on data collection and consolidation. In addition, the absence of a structured audit trail made it more challenging to demonstrate data governance and respond efficiently to audit requests.

Solution

BBGI began working with Sweep in August 2024, with a tight timeline to start data collection by November. The implementation was delivered on schedule, with Sweep replacing the previous spreadsheet-based process rather than adding complexity or workload.

Data collection across the portfolio was streamlined through a standardised survey approach, reducing the burden on external stakeholders and simplifying participation for portfolio companies without requiring extensive training.

Internal reporting is now centralised within Sweep, with dashboards providing a single point of verification for sustainability data. This enables real-time validation of reported figures and supports a more efficient and controlled reporting process, while also strengthening oversight of governance practices and social factors across the portfolio.

Sweep’s built-in emission factor libraries solved a longstanding problem. BBGI no longer needs to pay consultants for emission factors, and benefits from consistent factors across years, which better explain trends such as gradual reductions from national grid decarbonisation. As Cécilia Vernhes notes, “the data now ‘relates to the real world’ rather than showing unexplainable variability”.

BBGI can now generate and share tailored insights quickly, allowing the team to respond more effectively to requests from portfolio companies and external stakeholders, replacing what was previously a manual and time-intensive reporting process.  

The Act module has been particularly impactful, enabling BBGI to consolidate individual decarbonisation assessments into portfolio-wide analysis showing decarbonisation pathways, capex planning, and opex impacts across assets. The module enables simple scenario modelling with clear visualisations, supporting discussions with public sector clients on short- and long-term decarbonisation options.