Over the past decade, more and more investors have taken an interest in companies' commitments and records on environmental sustainability, social responsibility, and governance. The unavoidable financial risks posed by climate transition and the probable impact of other ESG considerations are becoming increasingly significant in investment decision-making.
We are talking about companies' carbon footprints, labor policies, human capital development, privacy and data security, board composition, executive pay, audits, and shareholder rights. These broad and impactful topics not only help us evaluate the long-term financial viability of a company but also helps us understand the "impact" these companies have over the communities they operate in and the world in general.
Sustainability In Need of Digitization
Digitalization and sustainability are two of the most powerful market influences in today’s global economic landscape. Standard setters and regulators are aggressively moving forward to develop a robust framework of ESG standards to measure, record, and most importantly, digitally report a company's journey towards a sustainable future. We know that not only can digital transformation and sustainability flourish together, truth be told, a more sustainable future can't be achieved without significant progress in digital transformation.
Digitalization and sustainability convergence offer both opportunities and challenges. The good news is that today’s digital technologies can help us make decisions smarter, faster, and more precisely – all of which can ultimately lead us to a sustainable future.
The Power of Collective Intelligence
When we examined the overwhelming evidence of rapid changes across multiple dimensions of sustainability – from capital allocation, consolidations of standard setters, government commitments to broad technological innovation, the market had reached a tipping point of overall societal awareness.
Rapid acceleration is needed on all fronts to keep sustainability goals within reach. No one can fight climate change and the other key ESG issues in a silo, and no one can innovate alone. Establishing the right technology partnership is often the fastest, easiest, and most profitable way to achieve ambitious sustainability goals.
Luckily, the field is full of dynamic and innovative companies and full of potential for real impact. Today, agile young companies operate in the ESG market alongside other larger global service providers.
These companies have challenged themselves to reimagine data collection and impact analysis as enablers for greater common goods like fulfilling the social impact information gap, uncovering the insights needed to respond to climate pressure, and thus enabling the redirection of funds towards sustainable activities, ultimately speeding up the transition to a carbon-neutral economy.
How Does idaciti Support the ESG Data Ecosystem?
Standard off-the-shelf data sets cannot address all the needs of ESG analysis. When it comes to ESG data, these young, dynamic companies have the expertise, research, or investment theories to set them apart. Many of these ESG-focused companies must extract data at scale from unstructured documents to form analyses and insights; for the most part, this process is either manual, disorganized or otherwise inadequate.
Democratizing access to data – and its curation process – is part of our DNA at idaciti. Our team has created a streamlined data collection and delivery platform. We take an ‘XBRL-first’ approach and employ ML-assisted technology to automate unstructured data collection from both regulatory filings and/or a proprietary repository of documents (like PDFs).
Our extensible framework incorporates human-centric machine learning operations in a unique solution that these business experts have the ability to automatically curate data points that drive meaningful analyses. With idaciti, these companies do not have to waste time manually collecting data. Instead, they can analyze data, deliver information for their customers, and spend their time making strategic decisions.
Do you have a proprietary repository of business-essential documents “collecting dust”? Or, maybe you use these documents every day, but need to spend less time “in the weeds”, essentially scraping data by hand out of ESG-related PDFs? We may have a solution for you. Automate data collection, structure data instantly, and receive the benefits of a future-proof digital data infrastructure with idaciti.
See idaciti solution in action: hello.idaciti.com/demo
