Sustainability Community

Hello everyone!
Hope you are getting ready for Easter! I certainly am.

Make sure you check out our events for April and May, we have lots of interesting things plan around sustainability themes and regulatory challenges. Here's where to book your places.

I am planning and researching the theme for our monthly online meetup for June this year. Based on the feedback from many members, our theme will be along the lines of ESG Data Challenges for asset managers and asset owners. Hence, I am keen to speak to portfolio manangers and heads of thematics - it is important to get your take on what would make this meetup useful and practical. We have data companies as members and they will be in attendance themselves. Great chance to sit together and find solutions.

Calling out to portfolio managers members - if you are open to a 15 min chav with me sometime next week or after Easter - I am keen to get your perspective to make sure our online event is super useful! Give me a shout.

Alternatively, feel free to share in this thread what are the top 3 challenges around sustainablity/ESG data that we should be addressing during our meetup?

here's a very interesting "European ESG Data Trends Survey 2024" from Bloomberg too.

Hope to hear from some of you (apariy@cfauk.org)! 

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Aya Pariy
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Hello everyone, 

According to what we have seen from our clients experience, the 3 main challenges regarding ESG data management are :

• Matching multiple ESG data sources (providers, public data) with investments : it is time consuming and requires a lot of manual tasks to obtain a high coverage
• Adapting to a fast-moving sustainable environment : regulation are evolving quickly and new indicators have to be followed every year, it is hard to integrate them in the existing data management systems / internal processes
• Ensuring all teams have access to the right information : ESG is now impacting different teams across organisations (investment team, compliance, risk, …) and it is complicated to have consistency in the different KPIs used by the different teams

Are any of you also experiencing these challenges ?

Marion Aubert

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Marion Aubert
Co-founder - CPO
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Hi Marion, 

Thanks for that feedback. I would probably add one challenge we often hear from clients is the need for transparency in the ESG data. 

This is driven by two forces, one is regulation where regulators are asking asset managers more and more questions regarding SI definitions and why a certain company is meeting their definitions. The other force is purely due to internal know-how being more mature and the portfolio managers/central ESG teams wanting to be able to deep dive and find all their answers at the top of their finger tips - such as what is the source, why is the number x and not y and so on. This feels like a natural step as the industry is moving further and further away from ESG ratings which are notoriously black-box. 

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Cedric Olivares Jirsell

Sustainability Analysis Manager

Matter
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Original Message:
Sent: 04-04-2024 10:38
From: Marion Aubert
Subject: ESG / Sustainablity Data challenges

Hello everyone, 

According to what we have seen from our clients experience, the 3 main challenges regarding ESG data management are :

• Matching multiple ESG data sources (providers, public data) with investments : it is time consuming and requires a lot of manual tasks to obtain a high coverage
• Adapting to a fast-moving sustainable environment : regulation are evolving quickly and new indicators have to be followed every year, it is hard to integrate them in the existing data management systems / internal processes
• Ensuring all teams have access to the right information : ESG is now impacting different teams across organisations (investment team, compliance, risk, …) and it is complicated to have consistency in the different KPIs used by the different teams

Are any of you also experiencing these challenges ?

Marion Aubert

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Marion Aubert
Co-founder - CPO
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Thank you for addressing such a crucial topic. Looking forward to our upcoming June meetup focused on ESG data challenges.

I'd like to mention another painful topic, which is physical risk data, encompassing data on chronic and acute events.

Under CSRD regulations many financial services firms will have to quantitatively evaluate the vulnerability of their assets to physical risks. In order to help firms with this task, we are currently trying to re-use models deployed by insurers to predict losses for catastrophic bonds. However, the insurance industry has traditionally focused on modeling losses associated with so called primary perils, e.g. earthquakes. Losses from secondary perils such as floods, wildfire or storms have not been widely modeled, and, therefore, cat bonds models do not capture the losses from such acute events well. One of the problems in modeling secondary perils is a lack of historical data.

It would be great to learn if any of our community members are facing with similar problems, and share their insights on how they assess the exposure of their assets to physical risk. Are you utilizing open-source models, or are you developing proprietary ones internally?

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Anastasia Kuznetsova
Associate Business Analyst
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hi Anastasia, thank you for joining in and what an excellent observation.

Just copying here the thread with a bit more on physical climate risk assessment - you might already know all of these - but just to keep it at one place as a thread for those who might need to take a closer look at this space.

https://connect.cfauk.org/discussion/physical-climate-risk-assessment

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Aya Pariy
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Original Message:
Sent: 18-04-2024 11:50
From: Anastasia Kuznetsova
Subject: ESG / Sustainablity Data challenges

Thank you for addressing such a crucial topic. Looking forward to our upcoming June meetup focused on ESG data challenges.

I'd like to mention another painful topic, which is physical risk data, encompassing data on chronic and acute events.

Under CSRD regulations many financial services firms will have to quantitatively evaluate the vulnerability of their assets to physical risks. In order to help firms with this task, we are currently trying to re-use models deployed by insurers to predict losses for catastrophic bonds. However, the insurance industry has traditionally focused on modeling losses associated with so called primary perils, e.g. earthquakes. Losses from secondary perils such as floods, wildfire or storms have not been widely modeled, and, therefore, cat bonds models do not capture the losses from such acute events well. One of the problems in modeling secondary perils is a lack of historical data.

It would be great to learn if any of our community members are facing with similar problems, and share their insights on how they assess the exposure of their assets to physical risk. Are you utilizing open-source models, or are you developing proprietary ones internally?

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Anastasia Kuznetsova
Associate Business Analyst
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