IDS Insights – ESG News

Günther Thallinger's latest article: "Recharging Global Growth"

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Günther Thallinger, Member of the Board of Management of Allianz SE, Investment Management and Sustainability, explains in his insightful article "Recharging Global Growth.", how we can tackle the economic slowdown and climate change.

SFDR Update: New EET 1.1.2 and enhanced RTS Proposals

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The recently released European ESG Template (EET) Version 1.1.2 and proposed improvements to the Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) aim to harmonize sustainability reporting practices in the European Union. Let’s explore the latest developments of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR).

IDS expert perspectives on sustainability reporting in Portfolio Institutionell

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0100

A recent article "Die Krux mit der Klassifizierung" (The challenge of classification) published in Portfolio Institutionell highlights an important aspect of sustainability reporting: the difficulties in classifying investment instruments based sustainability aspects. It discusses various solutions from an expert perspective.

From Disclosure to Reporting: SFDR Consultations and CSRD Standards

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0200

The European Union (EU) is actively working towards reinforcing sustainable finance by actively involving the public through open and targeted consultations on the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR). Simultaneously, the EU is preparing for the long awaited development in sustainable finance reporting with the recent publication of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) as part of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

SFDR: navigating the latest developments

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Following the application of SFDR Level 1 on 10 March 2021, SFDR Level 2 requirements also came into effect on 1 January 2023. Financial market participants now have until 30 June 2023 to start disclosing their PAI statements on an annual basis. Let’s navigate through the latest SFDR developments.

EU Commission adopts final RTS under SFDR

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200

On 6 April 2022, the European Commission adopted the final Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) and their five annexes that financial market participants will use to disclosure sustainability-related information under the Sustainable Finance Disclosures Regulation (SFDR).

FinDatEx consults on EET v1.0 and EMT v4.0

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0100

On 4 February FinDatEx (Financial Data Exchange Templates) launched two public consultations, one on the new European ESG Template (EET) v1.0 and another one on the update of the European MiFID Template (EMT) v4.0. The consultation is open for feedback until 25 February 2022.

IDS experts at the OS-Climate Technical Deep Dive sessions

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0100

On 1-2 Dec 2021, OS-Climate (OS-C) held technical deep dive sessions about the OS-C platform and tools. In the session “Data Extraction: Climate Metrics & Natural Language Processing”, Ismail Demir, Data Scientist, IDS – together with Lea Deleris, Head of RISK Artificial Intelligence Research, BNP Paribas, Jeremy Goh, Data Scientist, BNP Paribas, and Karan Chauhan, Data Scientist, Red Hat – presented the Natural Language Processing (NLP) toolkit.

IDS uses the NLP Toolkit to extract KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) from PDF documents. The PDFs are sustainability or annual reports published by any company, and the KPIs are ESG-relevant metrics, e.g. Direct Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

The toolkit consists of two complimentary components:

A rule-based component to extract KPIs from tables
A machine learning component to extract KPIs from body text

IDS experts are proud to collaborate in the development of the algorithms allowing for a faster and easier ESG data sourcing. This will give asset managers and asset owners a greater ability to measure and manage their physical and transition risks.

Watch here

Joining forces for a speedy shift towards low carbon economy: Allianz and IDS @ OS-Climate Platform, COP 26 in Glasgow

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100

The Linux Foundation OS-Climate Platform presented itself at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow with over 1.000 attendees. In collaboration with Academia, NGOs, Investors and Commercial data providers, OS-Climate provides a software platform that aims to aggregate the best available data, modelling and data science to boost global capital flows into climate change mitigation and resilience.

Reliable climate relevant datasets and science-based analytics are essential for climate risk management. Global leaders in sustainable finance and investment attended the event including Allianz Investment Management (AIM) / IDS GmbH Analysis and Reporting Services as a proud member of OS-Climate. The main idea of the event was to show that open data and open source tools – developed jointly by the sustainable finance community through transparently governed, systematized collaboration – will accelerate the transition to Net Zero.

With the main idea of the OS-Climate platform becoming a joint common data foundation for the transition to Net Zero, the Data Common session was kicked off by Thomas Kirchherr from IDS: “The challenges that people in organizations are facing with data and analytics made us join OS-Climate and collaborate with others through an open source approach to tackle the issue of inconsistent data.”

Christian Meyndt from IDS shared his knowledge on KPI extraction via rules-based and machine learning algorithms. Together with 1QBit and Allianz Investment Management SE, IDS has developed tools to extract and present data coming from unstructured sources, e.g. PDF reports. Christian stated: “Allianz and IDS have open sourced their solutions and contributed the code to OS-Climate in order to develop the tools in a collaborative way.”

Regarding the capabilities of building an open source portfolio alignment, Leyla Javadova from the ESG team of Allianz Investment Management SE, led by Udo Riese, gave an appealing introduction of the Implied Temperature Rise Model (ITR). The ITR is a forward-looking management tool that facilitates the evaluation of how individual investment decisions can contribute to long-term climate goals. The methodology has been set up compliant with the Portfolio Alignment Team’s considerations in the TCFD-Commissioned report “Measuring Portfolio Alignment”. It is a transparent, dynamic and science-based open source tool that incorporates backward and forward-looking data and covers multiple hard to abate sectors. ITR model compares companies’ emission trajectory with a given climate scenario and assigns a temperature score based on the alignment or misalignment thereof.

The event concluded with a “Call to Action” speech by Günther Thallinger, Allianz SE Board Member & Chair of UN convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance. He emphasized that this COP26 conference – in which the private sector has been present like never before – is only the starting point for the financial industry to change and support the change: “We must move forward to transform CAPITALISM into SUSTAINABLE CAPITALISM.” Thallinger also highlighted the importance of having high quality climate risk data and reporting to ensure accountability.

Going forward, both Allianz Investment Management SE and IDS GmbH – Analysis and Reporting Services will continue the collaborative efforts to build open source data and analytics for a speedy shift towards a low carbon economy. By joining forces we can make a change.

“Allianz is committed to steering our investment portfolios to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. High quality and reliable information about all the companies in which we are invested is the raw material for all decisions. Open-source analytics and open climate data is a very promising way to support the financial industry to fully integrate climate impact and work with the investee companies to transition to carbon neutrality. A huge thank you to all who are jointly working really hard on this key implementation effort, including our colleagues at AIM and IDS.” Günther Thallinger - Allianz SE Board Member & Chair UN convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance

Strong partner for climate-friendly business: Allianz invests in sustainable financial products

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Sustainability Report 2020: IDS parent Allianz SE reduces greenhouse gas emissions and increases volume in sustainable financial products by almost EUR 10 billion.