THE ROLE OF REGULATION AND DATA IN SHAPING TOMORROW'S GREEN ECONOMY

Mounting pressure from governments, regulators, industry, investors and customers has driven ESG to the very top of today’s business agenda. Moving forward, alignment and compliance with emerging ESG standards will be a critical differentiator for long-term business success across financial, energy and manufacturing markets globally. Approaches to implement ESG frameworks and best practices are not harmonized across individual markets and regions, however. This presents significant challenges when establishing corporate ESG agenda, which in turn hinders financial institutions’ ability to drive green lending and investing.

Data in particular will play a key role in delivering the traceability, transparency and insights to validate the ESG credentials of a company, a stock, or an investment strategy. Financial institutions will need to embrace high volume data processing, drawing upon machine learning and artificial intelligence and leveraging data analysis and harvesting via smart analytics. The scale and complexity of managing and storing data means cloud technologies may also be considered as they look to map an optimal path forward to a futures model sustainable finance.