Ask a Head of ESG or Chief Compliance Officer what their organisation spends on regulatory monitoring each year. They'll name the law firm retainer, or the hours their team puts in. Then they'll add a caveat: there's probably more they haven't counted.
They're right. And the gap is typically much larger than they expect. To help organisations surface that number, Datamaran has launched a self-serve Regulatory Monitoring ROI Calculator — a two-minute assessment that gives sustainability, ESG and legal leaders an evidence-based estimate of what their current approach is really costing them.
Why is regulatory monitoring getting harder every year?
Because the regulatory environment has changed faster than the programmes designed to track it. Globally, new ESG and sustainability regulations have grown by 104% in two years. In the United States alone, the growth rate hit 227% over the same period.
Daniel-Sascha Roth, Head of ESG Systems and Sustainability Management at Volkswagen Group, put it plainly in a recent Datamaran webinar:
"There's so much we have to assess so that we simply needed some help in order to digest the complexity around us."
— Daniel-Sascha Roth, Head of ESG Systems and Sustainability Management, Volkswagen Group
How many hours is your team really spending on this?
Datamaran's analysis of client monitoring programmes indicates that teams at large enterprises typically spend more than 600 hours per year on manual regulatory monitoring — tracking updates, reviewing alerts, attending briefings and circulating findings internally. That figure doesn't include the hours spent in cross-functional coordination, or the work duplicated across business units because no one system connects them.
The hours are real. They just don't appear on a single budget line — which is exactly why they're so easy to overlook.
Why does no one in your organisation ever see the full number?
Because it's spread across three separate cost lines that are rarely added together. Team hours sit inside sustainability headcount. External counsel invoices land in legal budgets — often running to hundreds of dollars per hour, with a single written opinion from a major law firm costing $40,000 or more. And compliance exposure — the risk of a missed regulation — rarely gets quantified at all until it becomes a fine or a reputational incident.
The ownership problem compounds this. In a recent Datamaran webinar survey, 83% of sustainability leaders identified regulatory change as the biggest external force shaping their strategy — yet when asked who owns monitoring internally, the most common answer was "shared and not clearly defined." As Marientina Laina, Head of ESG Compliance at Entain, observed:
"Easy compliance is a big team effort, an ecosystem effort. You need someone to orchestrate all of this."
— Marientina Laina, Head of ESG Compliance, Entain
When orchestration breaks down — under competing priorities or simply the volume of what needs tracking — the result is compliance gaps, duplicated effort and exposure that only surfaces when it's too late to act.
Ready to see your number?
The Datamaran Regulatory Monitoring ROI Calculator gives sustainability, compliance and legal leaders an evidence-based estimate of their total annual cost — broken down across team time, external spend and risk exposure — in two minutes, with no commitment required.
Run the assessment at lp.datamaran.com/regulatory-monitoring-roi-calculator
