Reflections on 2023 Future of ESG Data Conference

Listen to the thoughts of a leading European climate VC who are targeting a gigatonne impact in emissions reductions through investing in early stage climate startups and cutting edge innovations within the Energy, carbon removal, insurance, food systems and other sectors.

Employing our strong data engineering and data integration capabilities, Neural Alpha helped to deliver the Orbitas platform and landmark report on the climate transition risks of agriculture.

Working with a number of global partners, Neural Alpha led the development and data engineering on the novel supply chain mapping behind the inaugural Plastic Waste Makers Index.

Utilising our expertise in knowledge graphs, supply chains and sustainability, Neural Alpha was the obvious choice to help Refinitiv explore proof of concept applications of their Big Open Linked Data (BOLD) platform to ESG use-cases

Showcasing our ability to deliver sophisticated backend infrastructures, Neural Alpha delivered the database, ETLs and API powering Lucida’s advanced supply chain and deforestation analysis.

RC ESG Taxonomy provides an enterprise-grade ESG Data Strategy solution, integrating diverse data sources through an AI Language Model, human curation, and a professionally researched taxonomy, enabling ESG professionals to easily access, analyse, and align data with global standards and frameworks.

Discover how Neural Alpha, in partnership with Vivid Economics (McKinsey) and Natural History Museum (NHM) have developed a cutting-edge geospatial dataset. This transformative resource connects companies to physical assets, enabling rapid analysis of ESG risks like biodiversity intactness.

RC Physical Assets provides a global dataset that links physical assets to companies, enabling professionals to analyse environmental risks, biodiversity impacts, and evidence compliance with ESG regulations. The solution supports portfolio and asset-level ESG risk analysis using spatial data overlays and contextual information, benefiting various industries and regulatory requirements.

Analysing financial and sustainability disclosures is key to effective ESG Integration however with ever changing standards, guidance, formats and exponentially growing volumes this is proving a challenge for ESG teams with limited resources. Enter Machine Learning, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Neural Alpha’s Disclosure Assistant.

RC News Screen is a comprehensive ESG research tool with global data coverage and features like sentiment analysis, ESG concept identification, and geotagged contextual information for precise ESG engagement and investment strategies.

Neural Alpha provided an analysis on the scale and channels of UK financial sector exposure (both direct and indirect) to deforestation risk in Indonesian palm and Brazilian soy and beef, as WWF sought to strength commitments in the UK Environment Bill.

Materiality was again in the spotlight recently with launch of IFRS sustainability disclosure standards S1 & S2. Whilst the standards were generally welcomed as a significant step in creating a global baseline for corporate sustainability disclosures grounded in the best practices of accounting standards it was seen as controversial in some quarters. In a large part this was due to its approach to dealing with materiality and more specifically ‘double materiality’ — something largely avoided in the standards according to critics. Proponents highlight the mantra that “what can be measured can be managed” when suggesting that focusing on single materiality / materiality should be the priority for disclosing organisations and is thus the focus of these standards. Double materiality encompasses not just sustainability risks which impact a company’s financial performance but the degree to which that company’s products and activities impact the wider world — a philosophy more adopted in European standards such as in the work of EFRAG.

In this webinar, Ben Levett discusses how to apply deforestation due diligence guidance and how Trase Finance data products can power commodity trader assessments.

Neural Alpha leveraged our leading experience in the fields of connected data and finance to build a solution which made use of graph data. This technology allowed us to efficiently model the supply chain and financial links between entities as well as to flexibly query the data to provide in depth insights to users.

The ForestIQ beta brings together policy, disclosure and commitment data for over 500 organisations with links to the commodity supply chains linked to tropical deforestation including, soy, beef, leather, palm oil, timber and pulp/paper.

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.

Trase data estimates where a trader (and, by proxy, downstream companies that are customers of that trader) has significant exposure to a biome that is on a financial institutions’ exclusion list, subject to specific bank policy requirements (such as certification), or more broadly deemed an environmentally ‘sensitive’ location requiring more detailed screening.

In this webinar hosted by ISKO, Neural Alpha founder James Phare and ESG Researcher Dan Burke-Ward discuss the role of taxonomies in sustainable finance and how the Neural Alpha product suite centralises taxonomies for interoperability and reporting and the connection of various data types.

In this webinar, Ben Levett discusses why location-specific analysis is so important for proper deforestation due diligence and outlines how Trase Finance can help conduct TNFD LEAP-FI style assessments of commodity traders.

ESG Investing Awards Winners & Finalists 2023

Neural Alpha developed a new bespoke Real Assets Investment Management database and software application to automate key processes within the lifecycle of hydro, wind, solar, forestry and farmland portfolios

At Neural Alpha, we have been thinking about Air and Water pollution at sea. This notoriously challenging topic to track has profound ESG implications. Our new product, Responsible Capital News Screen, examines news stories worldwide (and at sea!) to identify reported ESG Events, such as bilge dumping, oil spills or stranded vessels. News screen identifies mentioned physical assets as well as their owners, enabling ESG professionals within asset management, banking and corporates to incorporate news flow into universe construction, monitoring & engagement, due diligence / screening and risk management requirements at scale without compromising on precision and context.

This blog is the first in a monthly series of free to subscribe newsletters covering the month’s most significant global ESG events, achievements, announcements, incidents, scandals and controversies powered by Responsible Capital News Screen. News Screen is an innovative, new data product launched by the team at Neural Alpha enabling ESG professionals within asset management, banking and corporates to incorporate news flow into universe construction, monitoring & engagement, due diligence / screening and risk management requirements at scale without compromising on precision and context. News Screen covers not only negative news flow but also positive news flow with reference to major company achievements, discoveries, inventions and other sustainability solutions covered by our models.

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 October 2018, we launched the pilot Green FinTech Challenge to support innovation and growth in the green finance sector as part of the Government’s Green Great Britain Week.

As part of UKSIF's Good Money Week, Planet Tracker and Trase Finance come together to explore what actions investors and lenders can take to mitigate the risk of financing deforestation, with the case study of the Gran Chaco.

Over 400 ESG funds run by asset managers such as Blackrock, State Street and Northern Trust are financing commodity traders who are linked to deforestation, according to analysis by Trase Finance.

Trase assesses the pros and cons of recent moves into green finance by commodity traders.

Trase Finance uses supply chain modelling to allocate annual commodity-specific deforestation risk in hectares to investors based on their total equity ownership in commodity traders exposed to deforestation via investing subsidiaries and fund shareholdings. For the first time this allows for a quantifiable and robust way to rank asset managers according to their exposure to deforestation risk.

In this webinar Neural Alpha CEO James Phare joined partners OpenCorporates to discuss the importance of open company data in due diligence and other requirements.

It is critical that institutional investors take action to halt the global loss of biodiversity. In this session James Phare presented alongside UNPRI, UNEP-WCMC & Caisse des Dépôts Group practical guidance, data and software tools investors can use to identify and manage spatially explicit natural capital risks within their portfolios.

Some of the world's biggest investors have been linked to deforestation of crucial habitats like the Amazon Rainforest. Can they use their financial might to stop deforestation in its tracks?

This nightmare can often seem a million miles away, but its implications for us all will be profound

James Phare presented the opening address of UKSIFs conference touching on Neural Alpha's view of the future of ESG data and the role ESG scores will play within this.

In this webinar, James presented some of Neural Alpha's work using Graph Databases and other connected data technologies to analyse ESG risks such as deforestation.

Consumers and investors demand to know the provenance of purchases and investments

Trase Finance – a collaboration between fintech company Neural Alpha, international non-profit research and policy organisation the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and NGO Global Canopy – seeks to identify second-order environmental impacts in supply chains, enabling transparency and shedding light on the hidden risks and opportunities that can materially influence financial and non-financial performance.

Trase Finance – a collaboration between fintech company Neural Alpha, international non-profit research and policy organisation the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and NGO Global Canopy – seeks to identify second-order environmental impacts in supply chains, enabling transparency and shedding light on the hidden risks and opportunities that can materially influence financial and non-financial performance.