ESG Investor’s weekly round-up of news on technology and tools in the sustainable investing sector, including Euroclear, Greenomy, GaiaLens, Eevery, ISS ESG, 2° Investing Initiative, Amundi Technology and Causality Link.
Post-trade services group Euroclear has invested an undisclosed sum in Greenomy, a Belgium-based sustainable finance technology platform. Founded in 2020, Greenomy digitalises data capture and reporting for compliance with EU sustainable finance legislation. Users include corporates, credit institutions and asset managers. The company also provides data analytics to help improve sustainability performance and facilitate the redirection of funds towards sustainable activities. Euroclear said its investment is in line with recent calls for financial market infrastructures to encourage greater sustainable finance issuance, through reducing infrastructure, regulatory and informational barriers. Alexander Stevens, CEO of Greenomy, said the company would partner with organisations such as Euroclear to bridge the gap between existing and new ESG taxonomies and standards, offering a new global market infrastructure, supporting both issuers and financial institutions in their sustainability strategy. “Euroclear is highly committed to building a sustainable marketplace through enhancement of its capabilities, strategic partnering and investments,” said Lieve Mostrey, CEO of Euroclear Group.
ESG scoring analytics platform GaiaLens has launched a real-time news service, GaiaLens Momentum, to capture and process all relevant news for more than 16,000 public companies. The service will run more than 100,000 internet searches per day on the companies, looking for significant company news and news on ESG themes linked to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, sustainability reporting and other themes such as modern slavery and gender equality. Sources will include national media, specialist investment and ESG trade media coverage, as well as social media channels. GaiaLens will process the news, adding metadata such as the date of publication and use natural language processing to score the articles for relevance, quality and categorisation. “GaiaLens Momentum helps investors see what is happening right now with companies’ ESG performance before it comes through in the ‘hard’ data. Processing this news data in real-time allows us to capture the ESG momentum of a given company and chart any progress in improving their overall ESG score,” said Gordon Tveito-Duncan, co-founder and head of ESG Technology.
The small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector has been targeted by ESG technology company Eevery with the launch of a sustainability measurement, improvement and reporting solution. Many SMEs are under pressure from clients, employees, lenders and investors to report on and improve their own performance across a wide range of sustainability issues, said Eevery. The subscription-based solution is aligned to standards and frameworks such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Global Reporting Initiative, the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index and EU Taxonomy. Eevery said SMEs represent more than 90% of all businesses worldwide and in the UK account for more than 50% of all business CO2 emissions. Once users have measured their ESG performance, the platform will help them to identify and implement relevant improvements, such as incorporating environmental considerations into supplier selection. Eevery said a key component of the offer is the identification of changes that are relevant to a particular business given its size, locations, industry and capabilities.
The difficulty of keeping track of the diverse requirements of ESG labels and standards globally is being tackled by ISS ESG, the responsible investment arm of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). The company has launched ISS ESG Labels & Standards Solutions, which will enable asset managers and owners to integrate industry standards for responsible and sustainable investing into their business processes and procedures. The Solutions cover key jurisdictions and international frameworks and will be rolled out on a region-specific basis, covering with immediate effect, AMF, GreenFin, AFG, Nordic Swan, UNGC, Label SRI, Label Relance and Towards Sustainability (Febelfin). These will be shortly followed by further Germanic and APAC labels and standards. Requirements of the different labels and standards vary significantly, from qualitative and quantitative reporting and disclosure, adhering to minimum standards, to integrating ESG considerations into the investment process. The Solutions include ISS ESG’s global coverage of up to 8,000 issuers for equity and fixed income assets, enhanced climate and screening controversies data related to an assessment universe of up to 28,500 issuers’ greenhouse gas data, plus 25,000 issuers covered within Norms Based Research.
1in1000, the long-term risks research programme of sustainable finance think-tank 2° Investing Initiative, has launched the Green Market Sentiment Indices (GMSI) to track corporates’ and financial institutions’ sentiment around the green recovery from Covid-19. Targeted at investors and policymakers, the indices track both corporate and investor trends around the green recovery. Similar to the purchasing managers’ indices which forecast indicators that track market sentiment around economic growth, the GMSI will act as forward-looking early warning signals on the greening of the economy. The indices use data sources based on forward-looking production and investment plans of companies in the auto, power, and oil & gas sectors, as well as key financial variables that show sentiment as to the future performance of climate leaders and laggards. The aim is to identify early in what sectors corporations and investors are likely to provide mutual support towards decarbonisation.
Amundi Technology, a provider of cloud-based technology and services to asset managers and institutional investors, has selected AI-driven research platform Causality Link to provide insight into drivers of ESG investment performance. Amundi Technology, a business line of the French asset management group, will use the Causality Link platform to explore the future potential ESG performance of companies, industries and other KPIs of interest. Insights from the platform will augment Amundi’s current offerings with a real-time picture of global markets derived from millions of AI-processed documents. Causality Link version 3.0 features an alert system that leverages real-time detections to provide users with a customised view of worldwide ESG events potentially impacting companies or industries of interest.
