Sustainable Investor - AI in SI: Own the Methodology, Lease the Infrastructure

ESG Investing Awards Winners & Finalists 2023

Paraguay is often overlooked in the deforestation debate despite hosting some of the highest rates in the world over the past decade. For 2019, Trase tracked over 200,000 hectares of deforestation associated with beef and soy exports in 2019 – an area larger than Greater London. This low profile has resulted in too little scrutiny of the finance linked to soft commodity trade and allowed financial institutions to skimp on the type of country and biome level policy commitments often applied to higher profile locations.

In 2019 Neural Alpha was commissioned to build a bespoke data platform for The Baltic Exchange which would become the base of all activities related to the publication of the Baltic Exchange’s financial benchmarks and derivatives. Additionally Neural Alpha developed a quality control system within BDP that is able to tackle the challenge of benchmark validation in a market with the unique challenges of ocean freight: unpredictable liquidity, extremely high volatility, and highly siloed market activity, with often restricted information. BDP deploys a battery of univariate and multivariate tests to be able to assess the contributors to The Baltic Exchange’s indices for quality, relevance, and conformity to expected standards.