The New Triple Bottom Line: Subscription Models, Partnerships, and Sustainable Metrics

Discussion with Yohann Assoune

Yohann Assoune is an executive with decades of experience in IT, subscription-based business models, and green technology. Throughout his career, he has played a pivotal role in building, scaling, and transforming businesses. Assoune highlights three critical areas where leaders must act: adopting circular economy principles through subscription models, forging multi-stakeholder partnerships, and embedding sustainable metrics into financial planning.

Leveraging Subscription Models for Circularity

Many businesses have successfully leveraged subscription models, moving away from single-use products and toward sustained customer engagement. In sectors like technology and automotive, companies are already adopting leasing and refurbishment strategies, ensuring products remain in use longer and reducing waste.

However, Assoune warns that subscription models must prioritize sustainability over short-term profits. “Subscription models are truly effective when they maintain the customer lifecycle, guiding them to a new level—not just capturing them”, he explains. In other words, businesses must design these models to encourage reuse, refurbishment, or responsible upgrades, rather than simply locking customers into recurring payments. Achieving genuine circularity requires companies to go beyond recurring revenue, and rethink their entire value chain and the design of their organization itself.

Furthermore, technological advancements are making these models more efficient. AI-powered predictive analytics and IoT tracking systems help businesses monitor product usage, optimize maintenance schedules, and extend product life cycles.

In the IT industry, Companies like HPE are at the forefront of this transformation, offering HPE Greenlake Cloud that is a full-stack hybrid cloud platform that delivers a flexible and scalable cloud experience, combines security, visibility, and ease of management whether you choose to buy, subscribe, or pay per use. This solution is designed to reduce waste and improve sustainability deployment while providing scalable computing power.

Forging Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships to Scale Sustainable Solutions

Sustainability is a systemic challenge that no single company can solve alone. Strategic partnerships, both within and across industries, are essential for turning today's degenerative economies into regenerative ones, and divisive economies into far more distributive ones. 

“Partnerships allow companies to share resources, mitigate risks, and bring expertise together to solve complex sustainability challenges”, Assoune emphasizes. He cites examples like Green-Got, a neobank that collaborates with Carbon4 Finance that offers a complete set of climate data solutions covering both physical and transition risks, as well as biodiversity footprint, to ensure investment funds are truly sustainable and develop a real green finance; and the environmental organizations named WWF’s partnership with HSBC and WRI to scale climate solutions for a global impact and fund biodiversity preservation initiatives.

One of the primary benefits of partnerships is the ability to overcome financial,  operational, and cultural barriers. Sustainability initiatives frequently falter due to their reliance on Western-centric frameworks that fail to resonate with diverse cultural contexts.

These models typically emphasize economic growth and technological advancements, often at the expense of social and cultural considerations essential to sustainable development. In contrast, a culturally nuanced approach acknowledges that sustainability cannot be reduced to a single, universal formula. Instead, it underscores the imperative of local partnerships as a critical component for successful international expansion.

This perspective recognizes that cultural sensitivity is not merely an afterthought but a foundational element in crafting sustainable strategies that truly resonate across different societies. By embracing local partnerships, organizations can tailor their initiatives to align with the unique values, needs, and practices of each community, thereby fostering more effective and enduring sustainability outcomes. 

For global executives, cultural sensitivity is paramount when deploying sustainability strategies across diverse regions. By understanding the unique values, beliefs, and local contexts of each community, leaders can ensure their initiatives are not only impactful but also equitable and respectful. This culturally attuned approach fosters inclusivity, strengthens trust, and facilitates more meaningful collaboration with stakeholders on a global scale.

However, partnerships also present challenges. Differing priorities and risk appetites can slow progress. To navigate this, Assoune advises executives to establish clear sustainability objectives and measurable KPIs from the outset. Companies must build consensus around shared sustainability goals and commit to long-term collaboration. “You can accelerate progress on complex topics by leveraging shared expertise, talent, and knowledge while distributing risks”, he explains. “This approach enables faster product launches, facilitates easier market entry, and becomes regenerative and distributive by design”. 

Avoiding the Greenwashing Trap: Authenticity in Sustainability Strategies

Greenwashing—the practice of misleading consumers into believing a company is more environmentally friendly than it truly is—has become a major risk for businesses trying to position themselves as sustainable. Today’s consumers, investors, and regulators are more informed than ever, and inauthentic sustainability claims can backfire, damaging brand reputation and eroding trust.

“Using sustainability as a marketing gimmick without real action will alienate customers and harm long-term growth”, Assoune warns. He emphasizes the importance of aligning internal operations with sustainability messaging. Companies that commit to environmental goals must ensure these values are embedded in every aspect of their operations, from supply chain management to executive decision-making. 

To avoid greenwashing, businesses should adopt third-party certifications (B-Corp, Ecovadis, etc), publicly disclose environmental impact metrics, and prioritize transparency in reporting (sustainability reports). “Authenticity is key”, Assoune explains. “A company’s sustainability efforts should be backed by measurable progress, clear communication, and a willingness to acknowledge challenges”. One of the best examples is the French holding company named Team for the Planet which is raising money to detect and deploy global innovations against greenhouse gases like Seaturns, Beyond the Sea, or Leviathan Dynamics by creating a large community of both companies and people who support them.

Integrating Sustainable Metrics into Financial Decision-Making

For sustainability initiatives to be truly effective, they must be embedded into financial planning. Traditional business models prioritize short-term revenue generation and endless GDP growth, often at the expense of long-term environmental impact. By integrating sustainable metrics into financial decision-making, organizations can quantify the business case for sustainability (climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, etc).

“Financial integration of sustainable metrics is critical. By embedding sustainable objectives accounting into cost-benefit analyses, firms can quantify the ROI of sustainability initiatives, securing buy-in from investors and executives”, Assoune asserts. He advocates for embedding sustainable accounting into cost-benefit analyses, ensuring that sustainability investments are evaluated alongside traditional financial metrics. Tools such as PlanA platform integrated with existing ERP tools allow Companies to assess the true cost and benefit of a sustainable strategy.

Moreover, aligning business incentives with sustainability objectives ensures internal buy-in across departments. For instance, shifting sales teams from a transactional mindset to a consultative approach—where sustainability considerations are part of the value proposition—can drive real change. “If your incentives reward short-term sales rather than sustainable growth, employees will act accordingly”, Assoune notes. 

Financial integration also strengthens investor confidence. “Strong sustainability commitments increasingly favor companies in the eyes of investors, opening new funding opportunities”, Assoune explains. Companies that transparently report on their sustainability progress and link executive compensation to sustainable targets are better positioned to attract long-term capital.

Consequently, Executives must reframe success metrics to include environmental impact alongside revenue growth. Recent findings from the KPMG Survey of Sustainable Reporting 2024 highlight a significant shift in corporate priorities. Among the world's largest 250 companies (G250), 41% now incorporate sustainability considerations into leadership compensation structures. Moreover, an impressive 96% of these companies report on sustainability, with setting carbon targets becoming an integral part of their business operations.

Executives attribute this heightened focus on sustainability to recent climate, economic, and geopolitical developments, which have underscored its importance in international market expansion. This trend is particularly pronounced in regions such as Asia Pacific and the Middle East, where the adoption of sustainability reporting standards is accelerating rapidly.

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The Future of Sustainable-Driven Business Strategy

Executives today face a defining moment: embrace sustainability as a core business driver or risk obsolescence in an economy rapidly shifting towards environmental responsibility. The path forward is clear:

1. Subscription models foster circularity and long-term customer relationships
2. Strategic partnerships amplify the impact, innovation, and deployment of sustainable solutions by reducing risks
3. Sustainable metrics and reports reshape financial decision-making to align profitability with planetary health.

However, the transition to sustainable business practices is not without challenges. Many organizations struggle with balancing short-term profitability and long-term environmental impact, facing internal resistance and external pressures. Nevertheless, companies such as Patagonia or normal focus on product lifecycle, using sustainable materials and encouraging repairs over new purchases, and their strategy pays off. 

Today, Executives must not only champion sustainability at a strategic level but also embed it deeply into corporate culture, ensuring that sustainability goals are not just aspirational statements, but actionable commitments backed by data and accountability.

At the same time, they must navigate an evolving regulatory landscape. Climate change laws, taxonomies, and transparency standards are emerging across industries. Understanding and adapting to these regulations is crucial for maintaining compliance and stakeholder trust. While voluntary guidelines and standards remain widely used as GRI or SASB, this could change as mandatory reporting like CSRD expands over the next few years.

To succeed, businesses must think like 21st-century Economist to change their goal from endless GDP growth to thriving in Doughnut Economics for turning today's degenerative economies into regenerative ones, and divisive economies into far more distributive ones, develop comprehensive sustainability roadmaps, integrating environmental and social governance (ESG) factors into every aspect of decision-making. “Sustainability isn’t just a trend—it’s imperative", Assoune asserts.