About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Citi Head of Sustainable Finance Reviews State of Play on Achieving ESG Goals

Subscribe to our newsletter

Financial institutions play a critical role in global sustainability and are making progress in ESG investment, yet significant challenges remain, not least the need for more and better data, and a common regulatory reporting framework.

Jason Channell, managing director, head of sustainable finance, Citi Global Insights, at Citi, discussed the strategic imperative for capital markets participants to take a key role in developing sustainability with A-Team Group president and chief content officer Andrew Delaney during a fireside chat at A-Team’s recent ESG Data and Tech Summit London.

Channell set out the state of play in ESG saying: “The public sector needs to set a framework and maintain impetus to make the direction of travel clear. The private sector is arguably making fastest progress, with the financial sector critical to achieving economic sustainability.”

While financial institutions previously ran sustainability and finance in parallel, Channell noted that they are now integrated in the financial community, with a focus on the risks of stranded assets, and the opportunities presented by a net-zero future. On the Paris COP agreement, he commented: “The money was in the room, focusing on risk and opportunity, and an end goal.”

Better Data

Breaking down the E, S, and G of ESG, Channell noted that governance is doing well in developed markets with emerging markets needing to catch up; interest in social, including health, education and gender equality, has risen as a result of the Covid pandemic; and the EU is leading on environmental issues, although the US is catching up.

Considering the challenges of ESG, data is a major issue, with more and better data needed by financial institutions to ensure regulatory compliance and meet their sustainable objectives. There will not, however, be a silver bullet when it comes to ESG datasets. Channell explained: “Firms will find datasets they need, but they will need to do their own work on them depending on what their individual goals are in ESG.”

Regulation is also an issue, with Channell describing the plethora of EU and UK regulation as “overly complex”, but suggesting this will improve for all jurisdictions with direction from organisations such as the GRI, Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) on global standards for ESG regulatory reporting.

He concluded that as the transition from investment in brown sectors, such as oil and gas, to green investment continues, it will be possible to make the economy more sustainable.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Streamlining trading and investment processes with data standards and identifiers

Financial institutions are integrating not only greater volumes of data for use across their organisation but also more varieties of data. As well, that data is being applied to more use cases than ever before, especially regulatory compliance and ESG integration. Due to this increased complexity of institutions’ data needs, however, information often arrives into...

BLOG

AI is Helping to Solve New ESG Data Challenges: ESG Briefing Review

The peculiar demands that ESG data integration places on capital markets participants requires powerful techniques that are increasingly being provided through artificial intelligence, A-Team Group’s recent ESG Data and Tech Briefing London heard. From data quality monitoring and analytics to supply chain analysis and investment management, AI-based tools are already offering automated solutions to some...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 14th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

Tackling the Data Management Challenges of FATCA

As the July 1, 2014 deadline for compliance with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act – or FATCA – approaches, financial institutions around the world are working to ensure their data management and operational systems will meet the requirements of the US legislation. This report discusses the requirements of FATCA and how the legislation is...