The interest in sustainable and impact investing remains high, and while scepticism is developing, much of this is focused on the potential for so-called greenwashing. Like many investment strategies, ESG-investing offers both great risk and opportunity. Technology investment in data enablement (data management and analytics) will be key to support clearly articulated targeted outcomes, based on explicit and transparent metrics. With nascent data standards and developing regulation, technology will also be key in addressing "data gaps" as the ecosystem matures.
With the economic profile of virtually every activity and asset requiring recalculation, a new market for information is being created that is as big as today’s financial markets. This new source of insight, comprising both structured and unstructured data sources, will need to be managed and integrated across the enterprise. Opportunities to add value and monetise the data or build competitive advantage are available to those that get their ESG enterprise data strategy right.
This report discusses the opportunities and challenges of the data integration requirements needed to support the next wave of ESG investing and compliance for financial institutions and solution providers across the capital markets ecosystem (buy and sell side). The report also provides a summary of current regulations and standards, presents buy & sell side ESG integration use cases and maps the data management solutions landscape, with recommendations for the path forward.
