Now more than ever, issues such as climate change, business ethics, and corporate governance are at the forefront of public and political attention. This is why an established set of business standards known as ESG (environmental, social, and governance) often plays a role in today’s financial professionals’ efforts to identify long-term opportunities and risks. However, financial services organizations face several data and technology challenges when incorporating ESG. These include sourcing, ingesting, normalizing, and linking off-the-shelf ESG data sets, as well as integrating ESG data into existing workflows such as portfolio construction, research, debt financing, and regulatory reporting. In a recent Deloitte survey of senior executives, more than half (57%) indicated that data availability (access) and data quality (accuracy/completeness) remain their greatest challenges with respect to ESG data for disclosure. While in another EY survey of global asset managers, most indicated the use of 2 to 5 different ESG providers, with some using up to 10 different third-party ESG data providers.
Snowflake helps organizations overcome these challenges by enabling an enterprise-wide approach to ESG, allowing more seamless ESG-data access and integration into workflows. Users can access ESG data, build proprietary ESG analytics, and integrate ESG workloads into workflow applications and tools. Organizations can accelerate data pipeline development by seamlessly accessing ESG data and other data sets via Snowflake Marketplace to power front-to-back office workloads. Business leaders can ensure full oversight and transparency into their ESG impact by calculating proprietary ESG scores based on an aggregation of third-party ESG scores, news, and other public sources. Finally, users can outsource the entire data pipeline, research, construction, and risk tools to managed platforms, including EY.
Here’s how a few of our financial services customers are using Snowflake to incorporate ESG data more seamlessly into their business.
NN Investment Partners
NN Investment Partners manages assets for investors across 37 nations. It stands apart in the asset management space with a dual focus on responsible investing and delivering strong financial results for its clients. To deliver on these two pillars, NN Investment Partners’ portfolio managers ingest data from multiple sources to assess investment cases and performance, and analyze each investment case on ESG factors. Up to 91% of NN Investment Partners’ assets are ESG integrated (data as of December 31, 2021). Collating all this data and visualizing it at scale is not straightforward. As the engineering team grappled with a legacy on-premises data warehouse and a multi-cloud data pipeline, it started looking for a solution to deliver data-driven insights faster and at scale, a service that Snowflake’s Data Cloud effectively offers its clients. Now, portfolio managers can quickly visualize any investment’s historical performance, while applying market data that might influence future returns and the many kinds of information that contribute to ESG scores.
NatWest
NatWest is a major retail and commercial bank based in London with an ESG Cloud Solutions-dedicated team. During Snowflake’s Financial Services Data Summit, NatWest spoke at the Industry Trends and Customer Spotlight session about how it is accelerating its ESG-analytics program in order to meet tight regulatory and compliance deadlines and reporting on progress. “The Snowflake Data Cloud allows real-time access to vendor data and has been a real breakthrough to accelerate our climate and ESG strategy,” said Kaushik GD, Head of ESG Cloud Solutions at NatWest.
For the latest on NatWest, join us for the on-demand ESG Breakfast Briefing, a panel of industry experts discussing the current challenges and complexity met with ESG integration – How Are Firms Driving ESG Integration Success.
Discover how your organization can use Snowflake to manage ESG opportunities and risks:
- Learn more about the Snowflake Financial Services Data Cloud.
- Read our Financial Services Success Guide: 8 Ways Financial Services Organizations Deliver Innovation and Security with the Data Cloud.
- Read our blog post: Are You Ready for the Next Gen of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)?
- See our demo: Incorporating ESG into Portfolio Construction.
- Watch our webinar: The Future of ESG in Financial Services: How Technology Will Transform ESG Inclusion (w/ StateStreet).
- Read our industry brief: Snowflake’s Financial Services Data Cloud.
- Watch our webinar: Financial Services Demo: Leveraging Data for Regulatory Reporting.