The Future of Ethical Sourcing

In this Standard Bank OneHub Series conversation, Justin Dillon, founder and CEO of supply chain risk platform Freedom (FRDM), and Joel Buatre, Standard Bank's digital ESG lead, tell Colin Iles why ethical sourcing has stopped being a compliance afterthought and become a genuine business line. Dillon traces the idea back to a 2011 consumer campaign that drew 30 million people, Buatre explains how a cold call made after seeing Dillon on CNN turned into a live product inside Standard Bank's OneHub platform, and both argue that data, not good intentions, is what actually moves supply chains.

The Slavery Footprint moment: how a government-funded survey became a company

Dillon built Freedom after years in anti-trafficking advocacy, including a campaign called Slavery Footprint that he ran with Obama administration and Google funding, an online survey asking consumers how many slaves it takes to run their life. Launched at the end of 2011 with a target of 150,000 people over a year, the survey drew 150,000 visitors in its first hour, and Dillon says over 30 million consumers have since used it worldwide. That response convinced him ethical sourcing was a real, unmet need, and led him to start Freedom, which helps companies see forced labor and ESG risk in their supply chains beyond direct, tier-one suppliers. Dillon says venture investors initially treated the pitch as "noble" rather than fundable, telling him he was "selling a vitamin, not a medicine," but argues the business has since become closer to medicinal as regulation caught up with the problem.

From invoice data to risk scores: what Freedom actually does

Freedom works from basic invoice-level spend data, what a company is buying and from whom, rather than from supplier questionnaires or audits, to build a picture of upstream risk. Dillon compares it to financial software: customers feed in what they buy and who they buy from, and Freedom returns risk insights, in some cases mapping a predictive bill of materials for a product or tracing suppliers upstream to raw materials and adverse media reports. He calls the approach "know your supplier," an echo of "know your customer" in banking, and says regulations including the Modern Slavery Acts in the UK and Australia, Germany's Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, and an upcoming EU due diligence law all require analysis further upstream than most companies have historically looked, exactly where he says the real risk sits.

Why Standard Bank picked up the phone: the OneHub partnership

Buatre says Standard Bank had identified data and supply chain transparency as a major gap for corporate clients across Africa, particularly smaller businesses without access to formal ESG ratings. He first saw Dillon in a Freedom advertisement on CNN during a US election broadcast, cold-called him, and found "an alignment of purpose" in their first meeting. The partnership now runs through OneHub, giving corporate clients access to Freedom's tooling alongside the bank's traditional products, including smaller Ghanaian suppliers who can now show global multinationals they meet recognised sourcing taxonomies despite lacking a formal sustainability rating. Buatre says Standard Bank first ran its own procurement data through Freedom before offering it to clients, and that the tool changes conversations the bank has about who its clients do business with further down their own supply chains.

Why audits and questionnaires fall short: the data-accuracy problem

Dillon says audits are at best about 60% accurate, citing studies from McKinsey and Deloitte, and supplier questionnaires get at best a 30% response rate while only capturing a backward-looking snapshot. He estimates 80% of supply chain data arrives unstructured, calling it "a hot mess," and says Freedom's early strategy of demanding clean, structured data shrank its addressable market, prompting a shift toward helping customers structure their own data instead. Freedom prices as an annual, unit-based subscription tied to supplier count, and Dillon says around 60% of customers expand their contracts over time. The same data problem, he adds, limits Scope 3 carbon reporting industry-wide, which is why Freedom now also factors emissions from customers' existing spend data rather than new questionnaires.

Why did Apple's cobalt announcement matter more than it got credit for?

Dillon says he wrote to Steve Jobs in 2007 asking whether Apple knew that cobalt in its supply chains was mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and got a same-day reply saying Jobs would look into it. He points to Apple's 2025 commitment to fully recycled cobalt, achieved partly by recycling old iPhones and iPods, as proof that a genuine ethical outcome and a sound business model can align, and argues the story went largely unreported because coverage of supply chains focuses on failures, not progress. His broader point: an ethical consumer movement needs people to recognise incremental progress, not wait for a finished, perfect supply chain that doesn't exist yet.

Does regulation drive ethical sourcing, or would companies do it anyway?

Dillon says most of Freedom's current customer growth is driven by regulatory reporting requirements rather than voluntary adoption, and argues shareholder-driven companies have historically ignored the externalities of their supply chains because there was no financial penalty for doing so. He believes most business leaders want to act ethically but are constrained by the structures they operate inside, comparing it to a US president who has "all the responsibility but none of the power," and argues the marketplace, not just regulation, is one of the best places to build systems that reflect people's actual values.

Is blockchain the answer to supply chain transparency?

Dillon says blockchain "can play a huge role" in specific cases like diamond or commodity mining, but argues it is only as valuable as the data fed into it, comparing an empty blockchain to a social network with no users. He says the real bottleneck is getting usable data out of opaque markets in the first place, and in countries that function as data black boxes, blockchain "wouldn't have much of an impact."