SESAMm is pleased to announce the appointment of Steven Carroll to its Advisory Board. Over a career spanning more than 25 years, Steven has built a uniquely broad perspective on financial data, having operated at a senior level across every major corner of the industry, from quant analytics and content to AI-powered research tools and global data platforms.

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A Career at the Heart of Financial Data

Steven has seen financial data from every angle: quant analytics at StarMine, content and indices at Thomson Reuters, and AI-powered search at AlphaSense. At Refinitiv and then LSEG, he took on progressively broader remits, culminating in his role as Head of Customer Strategy and Execution, where he was responsible for go-to-market across Workspace, Data and Feeds, FTSE Russell, and Risk Intelligence and Analytics. Throughout, Steven's roles have sat at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales, spanning multiple geographies, including Australia, Singapore, the UK, and the United States.

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Deep Roots in the Institutions and Workflows SESAMm Serves

Steven is a subject-matter expert on the content sets and workflows that underpin institutional investment and risk management, including fundamental data, estimates, broker research, ESG, sentiment, and credit analytics. He has also worked closely with the firms that consume this data, from private equity and asset managers to commercial banks and insurers, giving him a first-hand understanding of how they evaluate, adopt, and integrate new data and analytics tools into their processes.

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Expanding SESAMm's Reach Across Global Financial Markets

Steven's appointment comes as SESAMm continues to expand its AI-powered risk intelligence platform and deepen its relationships with private equity firms, asset managers, commercial banks, insurers, and financial institutions globally. His perspective will provide valuable insight, bringing a practitioner's understanding of how financial data businesses grow and scale.

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Steven is also the founder of CCAS (Carroll Consulting and Advisory Services), a London-based advisory practice supporting startups and established vendors across the information services ecosystem. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute and the Institute of Consulting, a member of the Institute of Directors and the CFA Institute, and serves on the Board of Governors at Greenwich Waldorf School.

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We're thrilled to welcome Steven to SESAMm's Advisory Board and look forward to working together as we continue advancing AI-powered risk intelligence for investment firms and corporations worldwide.

Housing and construction fees have skyrocketed over the past few years. This increase goes back to multiple factors: economic unrest, raw materials disruption, and labor shortage, to name a few. What does web data have to say about all this?

In this week’s “Alternative Data Trends” issue, we’ll talk about commercial real estate, unveiling the industry’s ESG and SDG conformity and the effects of COVID-19 on the supply chain and labor.

Commercial real estate volume of mentions

While analyzing web data dealing with commercial real estate, we detected an evident increase in the industry’s volume of mentions. This trend spiked in April 2020 and was initially hindered by the COVID pandemic, which resulted in a drop in sentiment polarity. Still, it witnessed a rapid recovery leveraging digitalization and e-solutions (Figure 1).

Case study: Unibail-Rodmaco-Westfield

To further understand the commercial real estate industry, we studied Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and its competitors. Unibail-Rodmaco, a French commercial real estate company, acquired Westfield, a U.S. company, in December 2017. This acquisition accentuated its market share and grew its web voice share compared to its competitors (Figure 2).

The chart in Figure 3 shows that the company’s volume of mentions has been increasing ever since the acquisition occurred. However, a negative sentiment polarity has been steadily increasing due to social ESG risks related to collective health crises during COVID and security-disrupting threats. In addition, the company faced difficulties collecting rent from retailers leading to lawsuits.

The arrows in this chart indicate Unibail ESG risks in time. The first arrow points to the social risks generated by security threats, in 2016, and the second arrow points to the issue of unpaid rent and lawsuits filed regarding the matter, in 2020.

According to web data, Unibail has the second highest volume of sustainability mentions among analyzed groups. The company was notably related to sustainable development goals number 8* and number 12**. This volume is manifested in their initiatives to help unemployed people and maintain sustainable ethics and practices when launching their malls and shopping centers (Figure 4).

* Social development goal for decent work and economic growth.

** Social development goal for responsible consumption and production.

The impact of COVID on the emerging commercial real estate market

As previously mentioned, COVID had several effects on the industry, both negative and positive. Furthermore, it reshaped the market and its work policies. Some companies, as well, chose to switch to remote work and digitalization. In Figure 5, we can see that sentiment related to remote work policies has steadily improved since the pandemic started. However, in the last few months, we’ve seen a sharp decline, potentially signaling a negative reaction to some companies requiring employees back to their offices.

In addition, the pandemic has resulted in labor shortage and supply chain disruption, eventually leading to tremendous inflationary pressure. Raw materials prices, including oil, gas, iron, and wood, have witnessed a drastic increase and a disequilibrium between the volume of demand and the quantity available (Figure 6).

Data source

To produce this analysis, we combined natural language processing with billions of textual web data related to the real estate market, commercial real estate in particular. Using NLP-powered models gives us an edge as we can extract ESG, SDG, and financial insights that aren’t necessarily obvious or easy to detect. These insights help investors make better investment decisions.

SESAMm leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to help you decipher and understand timely sentiments, trends, and ESG metrics on a wide range of public and private companies.

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Over the past decade, many organizations have improved their carbon footprints, from recyclable and biodegradable packaging and single-use plastic to planting trees and reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. However, some businesses and companies looking to boost their eco-friendly image without committing to serious changes and addressing environmental issues have been associated with false green marketing. We call this "Greenwashing."

Defining Concepts

What is Greenwashing?

Greenwashing is a practice used by businesses to represent themselves as more sustainable than they truly are. Greenpeace and the Environmental Protection Agency define greenwashing as making false and misleading claims about a product's environmental benefits or practices, services, technology, or company practices. Greenwashing typically involves companies spending more money on advertising and marketing than on implementing sustainable business practices that minimize environmental impact. These false green claims can deceive consumers into believing that a product or company is more environmentally friendly than it is, leading to increased sales and profits. As a result, false advertising, misleading initiatives, and groundless claims have increased green investors' exposure to risks emerging from potential lawsuits from activist groups, image deterioration, and heavy losses in assets invested.

In recent years, new concepts have emerged alongside greenwashing:

• Greenhushing refers to a company’s refusal to publicize ESG information. The company may fear pushback from stakeholders who would find its sustainability efforts lacking or from investors who believe ESG undermines returns.
• Greenwishing, or unintentional greenwashing, describes a practice where a company hopes to meet certain sustainability commitments but simply does not have the means to do so.

High-Profile Greenwashing Case Studies

When talking about greenwashing, the usual suspects are the oil and gas industry, the food and beverage sector, and other environmentally impactful industries. However, the financial industry has also been embroiled in its own greenwashing controversies.

DWS Greenwashing Analysis

DWS Group has been at the center of repeated greenwashing allegations. In April 2025, the firm was fined €25 million by German prosecutors for misleading ESG claims, building on years of scrutiny. It all started in 2021 with whistleblower claims that DWS overstated its ESG credentials, triggering investigations by both U.S. and German authorities. A police raid in June 2022 led to the CEO’s resignation, and in 2023, the SEC fined DWS $25 million for ESG misstatements. Lawsuits in Germany also allege false advertising around ESG. Greenpeace condemned DWS’s ESG bonus scheme as cosmetic rather than meaningful. Despite public commitments to sustainability, these controversies underscore a pattern of overstated ESG practices designed to attract investors.

BNY Mellon Greenwashing Analysis

BNY Mellon faced similar regulatory action. In May 2022, the SEC fined BNY Mellon Investment Adviser, Inc. $1.5 million for misleading statements about ESG integration in mutual funds. Although the funds were marketed as ESG-focused, the SEC found that BNY Mellon failed to apply ESG quality review as consistently as claimed, raising concerns about greenwashing in the financial sector.

The Challenges of Detecting Greenwashing

It’s challenging to produce an accurate assessment of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, which creates opportunities for companies to hide ineffective and fake green initiatives. According to Regtank, the main challenges to detecting greenwashing include:

• Lack of reporting standards – There’s no universal set of standards for ESG compliance.
• Lack of transparency – Companies often don’t disclose the specifics of their “green campaigns,” making it hard for investors and consumers to verify their claims.
• Limited consumer awareness – Misleading marketing can exploit consumers’ eco-consciousness and brand loyalty, reducing scrutiny of false green claims.
  

These gaps lead to inaccurate ESG data and scores, allowing greenwashers to avoid accountability. Ultimately, detecting greenwashing requires careful scrutiny of company claims and a deep understanding of their supply chains and operations.

How Artificial Intelligence Detects Greenwashing

As greenwashing practices become more common, activist investors, journalists, and the general public are using social media, news outlets, and blogs to highlight false claims. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an invaluable tool in the early detection of greenwashing by analyzing vast amounts of public data.

At SESAMm, we use generative AI and LLMs to identify greenwashing risks across billions of web-based articles. Our data lake covers over 25 billion articles in more than 100 languages from four million news sources, blogs, social media platforms, and forums, analyzing data on five million public and private companies. Through our AI platform, we generate reliable, timely, and comprehensive insights to detect greenwashing, monitor ESG controversies, and identify related risks.

The Regulatory Landscape

The rise of greenwashing is not going unnoticed by regulators, as frameworks like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) directly target misleading sustainability claims and hollow marketing.

1. The CSRD significantly strengthens the requirements for companies to substantiate their sustainability commitments. Mandating standardized and detailed ESG disclosures directly addresses the practice of greenwashing, where companies exaggerate their environmental credentials in marketing without meaningful follow-through. Under the CSRD, companies can no longer rely on vague or selectively presented data—any gaps or inconsistencies in their sustainability claims will be exposed in public filings, making greenwashing much riskier. This means an end to cherry-picked data and a shift toward more comprehensive, comparable, and verifiable ESG performance for investors and stakeholders.
2. The CSDDD (if it stands) further reinforces these efforts by obligating companies to go beyond marketing statements and prove they’re actively managing environmental and human rights impacts throughout their supply chains. This directive closes loopholes that greenwashing often exploits, such as highlighting only direct operations while ignoring supplier practices. By requiring due diligence on environmental impacts across the value chain, the CSDDD aims to turn sustainability from a branding exercise into a legal and operational priority. If real supply chain actions don’t support a company’s green claims, it could face legal action and reputational damage.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead, greenwashing will continue to face intense scrutiny from regulators, investors, and the public. With evolving regulatory frameworks like CSRD and CSDDD, the pressure is on for companies to ensure genuine environmental responsibility—not just green advertising. At SESAMm, we believe that the combination of regulatory rigor and advanced AI technologies will play a critical role in uncovering false green claims and supporting investors in navigating ESG risks with greater transparency and accountability.

SESAMm’s AI Technology Reveals ESG Insights

Discover unparalleled insights into ESG controversies, risks, and opportunities across industries. Learn more about how SESAMm can help you analyze millions of private and public companies using AI-powered text analysis tools.