As 2024 comes to a close, I’m proud to reflect on SESAMm’s achievements and energized by the opportunities that lie ahead. This year has been a milestone for our growth, partnerships, and technological advancements, setting a strong foundation to tackle the challenges and embrace the possibilities of 2025.

Looking Back on 2024: Key Achievements

Strengthening Client Partnerships and Expanding Our Reach

This year, SESAMm welcomed an impressive roster of new clients, in particular working more closely with LPs such as Swen Capital, banks, and asset managers such as Natixis, alongside numerous mid-market asset managers and private equity funds. These organizations are turning to SESAMm for more control over their ESG data and access to granular controversy insights, reaffirming our role as a trusted partner in sustainable finance. We also launched impactful partnerships with Ramboll, ARX, FinGreen, and CybelAngel, among others, broadening our reach and capabilities.

Building a Stronger Team and Advancing Our Technology

Internally, we strengthened our team with strategic hires, including our first team member in Canada, to better support our clients locally. On the technology front, we achieved significant milestones: introducing new platform features, launching a comprehensive product documentation help page, and reaching the capacity to process nearly 30 billion documents—our largest scale yet.

Adapting to a Dynamic ESG Landscape

Globally, the ESG landscape was marked by notable developments. Europe focused heavily on CSRD compliance, while Asia advanced new ESG mandates and regulations in South Korea, Japan, and Singapore. Despite regulatory shifts in the U.S., SESAMm experienced strong growth in North America, demonstrating our ability to adapt and thrive globally.

Innovating with Generative AI

This year also saw the integration of generative AI into our solutions, reshaping how we deliver value to clients. Risk Reveal, for example, enables automated controversy report generation and real-time insights.

Looking Ahead to 2025: Rising to ESG Challenges

Embracing ESG Challenges

As we close out 2024, the momentum in ESG shows no signs of slowing down. With new regulations like CS3D and evolving global frameworks, companies face mounting demands to monitor not only their investments but also their supply chains while improving transparency across the board. SESAMm remains committed to enhancing its tools to meet these challenges, delivering faster, more actionable insights to corporate and investment clients alike.

Harnessing the Potential of AI

The evolution of AI presents a major opportunity. Advances in generative models will enable us to further increase the scale and quality of our data processing. Our focus will remain on refining interpretation and reporting capabilities, empowering clients to make smarter, data-driven decisions on millions of companies with minimal friction.

The year ahead will undoubtedly bring its share of challenges, but it also holds incredible potential for progress. SESAMm is committed to remaining at the forefront of ESG and AI innovation, helping businesses not only adapt to change but lead it.
None of this progress would be possible without the trust and collaboration of our clients, partners, and team members. Thank you for making this year a success. Together, we are shaping the future of finance and sustainability. Here’s to another year of growth, innovation, and positive impact in 2025!

Reach out to SESAMm

TextReveal’s web data analysis of over five million public and private companies is essential for keeping tabs on ESG investment risks. To learn more about how you can analyze web data or to request a demo, reach out to one of our representatives.

Sylvain Forté, CEO and co-founder of SESAMm, presented the following at Finovate 2022. In the presentation, Sylvain explains who SESAMm is, what SESAMm does, including examples, and how it benefits our financial clients.

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. Watch the video for a better view of graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which the presenter might be referring to in context.

Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be with you today. I’m very glad to introduce you to SESAMm. I’m Sylvain, CEO and co-founder of SESAMm.

We’re an artificial intelligence company specializing in analytics for investment professionals and [corporations]. We basically extract billions of articles and messages from the web and transform them into actionable insights to make better decisions. We’re a team of close to 100 people now, and we generate insights from more than 20 billion articles and messages.

Immediate access to daily insights

Let me jump straight to the demo and give you a practical example of what we do. So imagine you’re, for example, a bank looking to compute environmental, social, and governance risks on your portfolio on your clients or on your suppliers. Right now, you may have access to ratings, which are updated once per quarter or once per year. We can give you access immediately to timely daily data on all of your companies in order for you to better assess risks and raise early warnings.

Wirecard use case

In this specific example (Figure 1), we look at Wirecard, a company that went bankrupt due to a 2 billion fraud scandal in Germany.

We extracted dozens of thousands of articles and messages on the company, and we can immediately see that there is a huge anomaly in terms of governance risk. The company is basically exposed to fraud accusations, to lawsuits, and the like, things that you don’t really want to see in your clients or your own portfolio.

Furthermore, we can see on this chart that we can get that type of indicator every single day. And we can see that six months prior to the company’s bankruptcy, there were already huge alerts actually here in January 2020, indicating that the company was in a pretty bad situation from the perspective of web content and web data from news to social platforms, blogs, and forums.

We really have the ability to compute live insights for ESG risk, sustainability monitoring, credit, and similar topics. The advantage of the platform is that we can go very deep. You can see here (Figure 2) some of the underlying governance topics associated with Wirecard, such as fraud, embezzlement, and crime—the main accusation—but also things related to anti-competitive practices or corruption.

And furthermore, the platform enables full transparency. This is AI at scale, but the underlying content is actually text articles and messages that you can read in order to understand the situation and see why the company is in that risk position. So with our platform, with our text analysis engine (TextReveal®), you can immediately extract content on your portfolio, your clients, your suppliers, and for example, generate ESG insights, competitive insights, sentiment insights, or credit warnings, for example.

Trusted, reliable, and abundant insights

We are today trusted by major financial institutions, such as Nomura [Holdings] or Raiffeisen Bank in the banking sector, for example, or large private equity firms worldwide. The reason why they trust us is that we can provide data more quickly—so waiting one day instead of waiting three months—to get an indicator. In addition to that, we have better coverage. We’re the only company in the world that can provide information on five million different public and private companies, meaning all of your banking clients, for example, are covered. And finally, we have access to a large variety of sources, from social content to news and blogs.

Insights beyond companies

Another example that is very common—sadly right now—is clients asking us to follow the Ukraine Russia War and to understand the current situation, including by getting access to local content in local languages in Ukrainian, in Polish, in Russian, to really understand the news and social media out there.

You can see here that beyond companies, we actually track sectors, infrastructure projects, and concepts.

Here (Figure 3), Nord Stream, for example, in the context of Ukraine specifically—so as to understand how these two topics are associated on the web—we can see an explosion in terms of volumes of data over time, the news associating this concept more and more, with more than 40,000 pieces of content. And we can see that sentiment over time, as displayed on this curve (Figure 4), decreases very rapidly, so we see the shock on e-reputation, and we can observe that immediately. And, for example, as a bank or as an asset manager, we can use that to assess the potential risk to clients or portfolio companies.

The interesting thing here is that, beyond the graphs and the raw contents, we can look at where the information comes from. Here (Figure 5), you see a lot of information in German, for example, which is not surprising. And you can even follow the Russian propaganda directly from the platform, looking at Russia Today or Sputnik straight from the engine, as these are also sources that we monitor.

And as you can see, these contents are highly customizable and can be used in very specific situations. So this is really a platform as a service (PaaS) that we offer. This is an engine that tracks four million different sources of information, and we can track millions of companies but also even fuzzy concepts, countries, or topics of interest.

Generate analytics from big data with API

One last thought. A lot of our clients integrate with our API; it’s a technical solution. We work a lot with data science teams, data engineering teams, risk teams, quantitative analysts, and heads of innovation. All of these teams are looking to generate analytics from big data and from web content at scale, with solutions that are currently used by dozens of clients worldwide and for which we provide very relevant analytics.

I’ll leave you with three final calls to action.

1. The first one is come see us at our booth. We would be very happy to present the solution in a bit more detail.
2. The second is, please request a demo. You understand that these indicators can be tailored to your needs in real time. So we’ll be very happy to show you a demo at SESAMm.com.
3. And finally, come see us for a free proof-of-concept (POC). We would be very happy to show you how we incorporate these solutions in actual banking tools and in risk management tools.

So the web is now readily available as a system that you can use and that you can rely on in order to generate valuable insights. We’re very happy to provide the solution to the market and to help inform better decisions and to help monitor risks.

Thank you very much.

SESAMm is pleased to welcome Guy Gresham to its Advisory Board. A globally recognized capital-markets strategist and former Group Head of Global Investor Relations Advisory at BNY, Guy brings more than two decades of experience in global financial services, specializing in equity capital markets, investor relations, and sustainability. Originally from New Zealand and now based in New York, he has deep expertise in regulatory compliance, ESG governance, and aligning global standards with business operations. His presence in North America will further strengthen SESAMm’s footprint in the U.S. market at a time of rapidly evolving expectations around sustainability and reputational risk.

Guy’s experience advising companies across more than 50 countries, combined with his understanding of the North American market, brings a tremendous amount of insight and credibility,” said Sylvain Forté, CEO of SESAMm. “He has a remarkable ability to bridge sustainability, regulation, and capital-markets strategy, and we’re delighted to welcome him to our advisory board.”

During his time leading BNY’s Global Investor Relations Advisory group, Guy oversaw a global team supporting issuers across multiple markets and guided companies through major shifts in regulation, geopolitics, and capital markets expectations. As co-chair of BNY’s enterprise ESG Advisory Council and the Sustainable Client Solutions Working Group, he advised executive management on governance and regulatory requirements, embedding sustainability into core decision-making and risk management.

Today, Guy sits on the advisory committee of Sedex, a leading global supply-chain sustainability data platform, and serves as a non-executive director at Strategy&Ops, an international consultancy focused on sustainability and digital transformation. He holds an MBA from Cornell University, a BA (Hons) in International Relations from Victoria University of Wellington, and is a 2026 Digital Statecraft Fellow at Cambridge University.

“The growing convergence of sustainability, regulation, and technology is reshaping how companies engage with investors and manage risk,” said Guy Gresham. “SESAMm is at the forefront of this transition, using advanced AI to surface insights that were previously inaccessible. I’m delighted to support the team as they scale these capabilities globally.”

We’re thrilled to welcome Guy to SESAMm’s Advisory Board and look forward to working together as we continue advancing AI-powered ESG and reputational risk analysis worldwide, including expanding our partnerships and presence across North America.

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.