Audio Transcript

Today the accelerating demand for ESG no longer seems to be new. In the last 2 years all financial institutions and analysts have presented a wide range of information about ESG and some of them estimated that within the next 5 years that 50% of AUM of European Funds will be invested on ESG strategies.

We all recognize how much Environment, Social and Governance aspects are really important for our society. But what is the meaning of ESG investing? And how is perceived from an investor? Is it as simple as increased performance or better risk management? I think it is much more, but I think it’s necessary to avoid ESG becoming just a simple word. And first of all I agree with the feeling of the market: it’s necessary to have a standard to measure impacts and monitor progress.

For financial institutions, every day we see how it’s important to have an integrated platform leveraging on high quality data and, on the portfolio management side, how important it is to add ESG factors to the other factors already in place to contribute to an overall understanding of portfolio characteristics and satisfy customer requests and goals.

Looking further ahead,we also see an interesting crossroads between ESG and AI. AI allows us to analyse a tremendous amount of data never possible before AI. And for sure, for example using sentiment analysis algorithms, AI can really enhance ESG data analysis and understanding companies behaviors and trends. But, the irony of this in depth analysis is the amount of electricity consumed in performing the calculations.