European Securities Network uses Symphony’s collaboration platform to create a compliant channel for members to connect with cross-company parties in real time.
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors are increasingly relevant in investing, operational, and purchasing decisions. The Insights Platform’s natural language processing (NLP) systematically evaluates and quantifies the materiality of ESG in the news with an unbiased dataset built around transparency. Investors can use Insights Platform’s NLP to understand how ESG events drive company performance, drilling down to the specific sentences that our NLP tags as material— well ahead of when this information is furnished in a company’s reported information or is revealed by the market. The Insights Platform delivers these insights via dashboards or APIs integrated into internal systems, with the option for customization.
The Insights Platform team created a custom ESG-NLP Model to parse text for research purposes, using client press releases to identify when ESG events are cited as material credit drivers. The model captures client-specific ESG taxonomy, including a broad range of qualitative considerations. These considerations relate to the sustainability of an organization and to its broader impact on society relative to its business practices, investments, and activities. Examples include conversation around a company’s carbon footprint and the accountability of a company’s management or a nation’s government. The enriched research content helps to facilitate conversations with regulators.
The Insights Platform team worked with a research team on a custom ESG-NLP Model to analyze 10 years of content that had previously not been examined using a sustainability framework. In single- and multi-entity research, our model extracted material ESG conversations related to themes like Human Capital and Corporate Transparency. Through this proprietary data set, the research team were able to find meaningful evidence of a positive relationship between institutions’ ESG profiles and monetary returns.
Working with the Impact Advertising team at a leading media company, the Insights Platform team created an ESG tracker on news for their key accounts, allowing the team to track the sentiment around clients before and after impact campaigns. The ESG tracker empowered their sales force to react quickly to emerging ESG risks faced by their accounts, create targeted pitches to accounts with negative sentiment, and validate their campaigns by systematically tracking news.
A sustainability investor approached Symphony because they worried about missing important ESG information in news — information that wasn’t being captured in company disclosures or by survey-based data providers. The investor leveraged the Insights Platform’s off-the-shelf ESG analytics to track their portfolio, learning in real-time when material ESG conversations were taking place in the news sources that mattered to them. Previously the investor would comb through all news that contained a set of ESG terms and mentions of their portfolio companies. Now, the Insights Platform points them to the riskiest articles every day, helping to target their research.
A savvy investor with a sustainability mandate asked Symphony for next-generation ESG datasets. The investor had been consuming data from several other providers, but wondered what insights were being overlooked. Working with the Insights Platform, the investor was able to backtest our Deception signal, a proxy for management transparency created by looking at clarity in Q&A on Earnings Calls. The results showed performance for companies with consistently low deception (high clarity). The Insights Platform team is now working to create similar datasets for further testing.
2024 has been a reality check for automotive manufacturers and the long heralded green shift towards renewables and electric cars. Symphony’s ESG Platform shows that mentions for electric vehicles, normally an overwhelmingly positive topic in our taxonomy, are seeing more negative sentiment and mentions.
Data security and regulatory controls grow more important every year, due to increasingly sophisticated hacking groups, generational shifts in technology and the massive financial fines imposed by the regulators in cases of non compliance with data-handling requirements. The pressure is on for trusted partners that deliver robust data security that prioritizes cryptographic protection, offers purpose-built security solutions, and fosters a culture of collaboration and transparency.
The 2020s are an unprecedented decade of disruption and every market participant is either the disruptor…or the disrupted. Today, we stand at the precipice of artificial general intelligence and every well-run organization should be actively seeking to disrupt themselves right now. Symphony has been able to remain almost a decade ahead of disruption by understanding one simple truth—thriving through disruption. This demands three things from your technology: resiliency, stability and flexibility.