S&P Global Acquires The Climate Service

Climate risk calculations provider The Climate Service has been acquired by S&P Global to bolster its ESG data products. The Durham, North Carolina-based company created the Climanomics platform, which quantifies companies’ climate risks in alignment with the Task Force gor Climate Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). S&P Global will add the service to its ESG offerings, which include the Sustainable1 data, benchmarking and analysis suite to tools.

Deloitte and AccessFintech Join Forces to Address Digital Transformation

Deloitte and AccessFintech have formed a strategic alliance to support financial institutions as they digitally transform their operations. The alliance brings together Deloitte’s financial services industry consulting and advisory services, and AccessFintech’s data management and workflow solutions that are designed to overcome challenges relating to legacy IT platforms, fragmented data and manual processes. AccessFintech’s offerings include Synergy DataLake, which enables the industry to share data and optimise operations through collaboration; and Synergy Network, which enhances data and workflows, and underpins the transformation of operations using transaction lifecycle management and benchmarking insights from across the financial ecosystem.

Bloomberg Adds Municipal Bonds ESG Tracker

Bloomberg has widened its coverage of municipal bonds in the US with a an ESG-focused index. the Bloomberg US Municipal Impact Index tracks local and regional dollar-denominated debt that has been categorised as green, social or sustainability securities at issuance or via an independent assurance organisation. The bonds will also feature within sub indexes for each individual category. Only tax-exempt issues that have at least a year until maturity are included.

ICE Integrates RIMES ETF Data

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) has integrated ETF data managed by RIMES into several of its products, including ICE ETF Hub, ICE Portfolio Analytics and ICE FI Select. The addition of the RIMES data will allow customers to access digestible and comprehensive equity and fixed income ETF data across ICE’s suite of ETF workflows, and gain deeper insights, analytics and data around ETFs to make better informed decisions.

ICE Acquires Climate, Real Estate Risk Analytics Firms

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) has acquired risQ and Level 11 Analytics. RisQ is a climate risk specialist and Level 11 focuses on geospatial data for the real estate sectors. The purchase of the two broadens ICE’s ESG capabilities within the fixed income space. At the same time, the Atlanta, Georgia-based exchange, data and technology giant unveiled an ESG data and analytics product targeted at the US mortgage market.

EU Approves Implementation of Taxonomy Delegated Act

The European Union’s Taxonomy climate Delegated Act will come into force next month, a move that’s considered a milestone in the bloc’s aim to bring sustainability accounting to its companies. The member states of the EU’s Commission approved the implementation of the regulation. The EU Taxonomy is seen as key to enabling investors to accurately compare the ESG disclosures of corporates and provides a sustainability benchmark and common language for markets.

FactSet Joins AWS Data Exchange

FactSet has joined the AWS Data Exchange and will deploy over 30 proprietary datasets available within the FactSet ecosystem on the exchange, allowing clients to use its content for faster, more efficient decision making. The data will be made available on AWS Data Exchange using Amazon Redshift Data Sharing, which allows clients to securely and easily share live data across Amazon Redshift clusters. FactSet will also begin listing APIs that allow users to benefit from its portfolio analytics engine without being existing FactSet clients. Additional APIs to AWS Data Exchange will provide flexible access to all FactSet content and functionality.

JUMP Adds SIX ESG and Sanctions Data to Investment Management Platform

SIX and JUMP Technology, provider of a modular investment management platform, have extended a 10-year partnership in order to provide users of the JUMP platform with greater access to SIX data. JUMP offers advanced connectors to the SIX data feed, allowing users to automatically plug in and collect a wide variety of financial data provided by SIX, including securities characteristics, daily prices, intra-day prices, issuer master files, corporate actions, and look-through data. The 10-year anniversary extends coverage of the connector to include SIX ESG data and data related to sanctioned securities monitoring.

Synechron Partners Differential Privacy Solutions Provider LeapYear to Help Clients Monetise Data

Digital transformation consultancy Synechron has partnered LeapYear Technologies to accelerate the use of ‘differential privacy’ solutions that Synechron can provide to its banking, asset management, insurance, and stock exchange clients. LeapYear unlocks commercial value from large-scale data in a mathematically proven, scalable, rigorous, and anonymised way.

The companies have developed a proof of concept and can now help financial services firms get value from their data with ironclad protection of the source. Sandeep Kumar, managing director, innovations, at Synechron, says: “Firms can monetise the vast amounts of data they collect. The data can be collectively leveraged to derive analytics and valuable insights, while keeping individuals, clients and institutions private.”

Ishaan Nerurkar, CEO at LeapYear Technologies, adds: “Our solutions allow enterprises to break down silos, form data partnerships, and maximise the commercial impact of their franchise data.”

EY Survey Shows Growing Demand for Consistent ESG Reporting Standards

A survey by professional services giant EY Assurance has found that three quarters of financial leaders want to see more consistent ESG reporting standards and that they must be mandatory. A similar proportion of the 1,000 executives interviewed said that ESG was a “significant part of their role” – up from two-thirds in the poll last year. Nevertheless around a third of respondents said that there was a lack of real-time data and information with long-term value. And almost a quarter said there was a “disconnect” between reporting ESG and mainstream financial information. “There is no doubt that the drive towards improved sustainability reporting is gaining momentum… but there is a steep mountain to climb,” said Marie-Laure Delarue, EY Global Vice Chair.