What a difference a year makes.
At A-Team Group’s last big ESG event, in the spring of last year, delegates were still buoyant about the ESG space even after a bruising 12 months in which anti- sustainability rhetoric had risen again. Calls among conservatives in the US to backpedal on regulatory controls combined with the implementation of bans on ESG asset investment by some states’ municipal finance teams couldn’t chill the enthusiasm of adherents, especially in Europe.
Now, weeks before our next such event – ESG Data and Tech Briefing London – the picture is a little more nuanced: while market participants remain bullish, they’re also adapting to the new mood music.
Optimism
No matter the broader sentiment, enthusiasm for the integration of ESG data and processes in organisations’ data setups remain strong. That is evident in the emergence of new data and tech vendors over the past year, the creation of new ESG products and services by existing providers and, within markets, continued investment into sustainability-linked funds and assets.
Among banks, there has been a realignment of focus towards climate and transition risk management. And, possibly in a bid to avoid any perceived taint from use of the word “sustainability” in these times of political pushback, some organisations – including BNP Paribas and Standard Chartered – have begun using the word “resilience” as a synonym in their communications.
These trends indicate that institutions are reluctant to readily cast ESG from their
operations.
Furthermore, while diversity, equality and inclusion policies have been blacklisted in US officialdom, in practice they remain largely in place at corporations, and institutions are still committed to including environmental and social impacts in their risk-mitigation processes, all to the benefit of data and tech providers.
Deep-dive
There have been less optimistic developments, too. In the past year, for instance, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Societe Generale and ABN AMRO have pulled out of the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). HSBC, Standard Chartered and Barclays downgraded their ESG teams. And even the European Union, which has been a beacon on sustainability regulations, has begun to water down come of its most far-reaching rules.
At A-Team Group’s ESG Data and Tech Briefing London, experts will cast their eyes over these and other developments from the past year. Importantly, they will also offer insights and opinions on best practices to align their data processes with this new phase of the ESG story.
Opening proceedings will be Barrie Ingman, Legal Counsel, Head of Regulatory Developments at Mizuho who will be interviewed in the Keynote Fireside Chat by Priyanka Harkness, Group Head of Regulation, Chief Sustainability Office at Deutsche Bank on navigating the ESG and sustainability regulatory and litigation landscape.
We asked Ingman to list his top three predictions for the coming year:
- Deregulation, Deregulation, Deregulation
“It has already begun in the EU with the ominous Omnibus dialling down the CSDDD, CSRD and Taxonomy requirements. Expect more to come, at a more granular level, and expect any UK measures adopted to be of an equally flat and unambitious quality.” - Tepid Enforcement
“Just a few short years ago the market was waiting agog for a tsunami of greenwashing enforcement cases. Today, economic and geopolitical considerations have quashed the appetite for aggressive ESG enforcement action and so if there are any cases at all within the UK or EU, which is far from a given, then they are likely to be small fry, lest regulatory authorities stoke the ire of their political masters.” - The inexorable shift to a ‘Transition Finance’ model
“Competitiveness overrides any other policy considerations in Europe at present. As such, expect punishing ESG corporate and product reporting and greenwashing rules to be paired down and enabling ‘transition finance’ measures to be ramped up. There remains a dissonance between the political environment and the investment community, with the latter continuing to retaining a significant % of AUM allocated to green investments. Policy makers will continue to seek to channel that capital into their jurisdictions with a favourable set of regulatory measures.”
A-Team Group’s ESG Data and Tech Briefing will take place on 4 June and will take in topics that also include:
- Best approaches for ESG data sourcing and management
- How to improve ESG data quality
- How to manage the complexity of unstructured data and its ongoing incorporation
into financial institutions across the technology stack - The role of cloud-based technologies and infrastructures to enable agility and
scalability - Opportunities and challenges for harnessing ESG data with AI and ML
- Unlocking ESG data from private markets
Register your attendance here for the event, which will take place at Glaziers Hall in Central London.
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