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On September 30, we co-hosted an executive breakfast with Inrate in Zurich. The discussion kept coming back to one idea. Double materiality is no longer held back by a lack of data. It is held back by the judgment needed to make sense of data that is vast, contradictory, and often late. We asked Saurabh Srivastava, Managing Director at Inrate, and Sylvain Forté, CEO of SESAMm, to pick up where they left off. How does a controversy become a rating? How fast should that happen? And what can AI do along the way, and what can it not?

Saurabh, you split the data problem into three: contradiction, fragmentation and contested data. What does each look like for a rating agency?

Saurabh Srivastava, Inrate: All three come up every day. Contradiction is when the same emissions figure differs between a company's sustainability report, its CDP response and its local filings. Fragmentation is subtler: financed emissions, for example, are spread across asset classes, so no single source gives you the full picture. Contested data is the hardest of all. A supplier dispute is reported differently by each party, and a court may only settle it years later.

Each of these needs a judgment call, and each judgment has to be traceable and auditable. That's why we use AI for triangulated quality assurance, checking every data point against several independent sources, while an analyst makes the final call and documents it.

Sylvain, which of those can AI actually solve today, and which still need a human?

Sylvain Forté, SESAMm: 

Fragmentation is where AI helps most, because it's a problem of scale. Pulling scattered information together across millions of companies and around 100 languages is not something a team can do by hand, and no one should be writing summaries by hand anyway.

On contradiction, AI gives you an independent view. Companies often report much later than what is already visible in the public domain, so what journalists and NGOs are saying is a useful check on what a company discloses.

Contested data is where the story keeps moving. Take a local NGO accusing a factory of polluting a river. The story may only appear in the local press, and it isn't always clear which company the factory belongs to. AI finds it, links it to the right company and keeps following it as it develops: whether a fine is imposed, whether a court rules, how many people are affected. All of that feeds a first severity score.

Throughout this process, humans stay in the loop at two levels. Every day, our ESG analysts conduct quality control and use what they find to keep refining the algorithms. Reviewing everything by hand would be impossible, and that's the whole point of AI at scale. And the final judgment call stays with the people using the data. A secondaries investor that inherits 500 companies can use AI to narrow the list down to five, then make the call on those five itself. Our principle is AI for scale, humans for validation. 

Saurabh, Inrate sources its controversy data from SESAMm. What happens once a signal reaches you?

Saurabh: What we receive from SESAMm is the events flow: controversies picked up across a huge range of sources, often in the local language, matched to the right company, classified by risk type, and given a first severity score. Our job is to translate those signals into what they mean for our rating, and that's where our own controversy framework comes in. We look at how severe and credible an event is, how long-lasting it is, and whether the company has taken corrective action. 

A controversy is also never assessed in isolation. It's one of three pillars in our rating, alongside our business activity analysis and our disclosure analysis. Controversies matter because they show what's happening outside of what a company reports. You can trust disclosures, but you need to verify them. Put simply, SESAMm tells us what is happening, and we decide what it means for the company's impact and risk. 

Sylvain, controversy signals tend to move before ratings do. Is that a problem for ratings?

Sylvain: The evidence does point that way. Several studies by our quantitative clients found that controversy signals tend to anticipate ESG rating downgrades, with statistically significant results.

But I wouldn't read that as ratings being slow. Ratings are built to be stable because investors use them to allocate capital, and some facts stay contested for years. The value is in having both: an early signal for monitoring, and a stable rating you can build a portfolio on. What matters is that a serious controversy reaches the people making the rating quickly, so they can decide whether it warrants a review.

Saurabh, you called the falling cost of assembling impact evidence "the most interesting thing happening for us today." Why?

Saurabh: Because of the contrast with financial materiality. There, we were already well served by AI and machine learning: the information was structured, and there was always a strong P&L reason to use it. Impact is different. No company publishes its externalities, and none ever will, so you have to piece that picture together from local-language filings, trade documents and many other sources. Not long ago, much of that was collected and analyzed by hand. Now a lot of it reaches us already indexed and ready for an analyst to use, so the cost of assembling that evidence has come right down. Add growing access to geospatial data, and we can back an impact claim with far more evidence, and far more confidence, than we could a few years ago. 

Sylvain, where does local-language data add the most to that picture?

Sylvain: Inrate's ratings start from what companies do, not only from what they disclose, and that's where local-language data adds the most. A dispute at a supplier or a protest against a project is usually reported first in the local press, and sometimes only there. 

It matters even more where there's no disclosure at all. Private companies and infrastructure projects often publish no sustainability report. For due diligence on them, outside-in data is usually enough, even if it isn't enough for a full score. Infrastructure is a good example of demand running ahead of supply: insurers in particular want to understand underwriting risk on projects that traditional coverage barely reaches.

Saurabh, disclosure is shrinking, with the EU Omnibus narrowing reporting and some Swiss large caps disclosing less. Can providers close the gap?

Saurabh: Partly. The duty is shifting to providers, and better estimation, for example, on scope 3 categories, and growing access to geospatial data make up for part of what's being lost. But there are limits. Biodiversity and physical risk are local by nature, and an estimate can't fully replace information about a specific site.

The further down the value chain you go, the darker it gets. Tier-3 and tier-4 suppliers are still largely opaque, for investors and often for the companies themselves.

Sylvain, can AI shed light on those deeper tiers?

Sylvain: It's the only realistic way. A company with 1,000 suppliers already has over a million relationships by tier 3, and risk travels through those chains, from private suppliers into public portfolios. No team can map that by hand. It takes AI-assisted coverage and navigation. 

And it's happening at an odd moment. Corporate sustainability reporting is being scaled back, while ESG rating providers now face new authorization and transparency rules. Providers are being asked to fill more gaps and, at the same time, to be more open about how they fill them. That makes the combination we've described, AI for scale with accountable human judgment on top, more important, not less.

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About SESAMm. SESAMm is an AI company specializing in controversy monitoring and ESG risk. It analyzes over 35 billion documents in around 100 languages to cover 5 million companies and infrastructure projects across public and private markets. sesamm.com

About Inrate. Inrate is an independent Swiss sustainability rating agency. Its impact ratings, screening, regulatory and thematic datasets, and stewardship services start from what companies do, not only what they disclose. inrate.com

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By Sylvain Forté (SESAMm) and Mariya Peykova (Scientific Climate Ratings)

Picture two infrastructure assets.

The first carries obvious physical exposure, sitting right where the climate is changing fastest. The second is operationally robust and is considered sustainable, but it generates a steady stream of fines, local opposition, and headlines.

Which one is riskier to investors?

The answer depends on which question you're asking.

Viewed through a climate model lens, the first asset appears more exposed. Viewed through real-time controversy monitoring, the second demands more immediate attention. Neither assessment is wrong. Each captures a different dimension of risk.

That's why leading infrastructure investors increasingly rely on multiple perspectives rather than a single measurement. Climate risk doesn't reduce to a single definitive answer. It unfolds across different time horizons, different datasets, and different types of evidence. Looking through multiple lenses provides a richer understanding of an asset's resilience and the risks that may shape its performance throughout the investment lifecycle.

Four complementary lenses help build that picture: physical, transition, controversy, and regulatory.

The first two, physical and transition, are forward-looking. They use models and scenarios to estimate how climate change and the low-carbon transition may affect an asset over years and decades. The other two, controversy and regulatory, are grounded in today's reality, tracking emerging events, stakeholder concerns, enforcement actions, and changing policy as they happen.

Together, these lenses provide a more complete understanding of risk. Physical and transition analysis explain where an asset is heading over the mid and long term. Controversy and regulatory monitoring reveal what is happening today and how quickly new issues are emerging. Rather than competing, they complement one another.

We explored exactly this approach during a recent live session co-led by Sylvain Forté, CEO of SESAMm, and Mariya Peykova, Sales Director at Scientific Climate Ratings, where they put a real infrastructure asset, a coal-fired power plant operated by LEAG, through each of the four lenses. The session demonstrated how decision makers can integrate Scientific Climate Ratings’ and SESAMm’s products to capture climate risk from all angles. Below, we’ve recapped key takeaways from that analysis.

The Long View: Physical and Transition

Start with the lenses that look across the life of the asset: physical and transition. Both are the domain of Scientific Climate Ratings, which translates climate science into financial metrics that investors can act on. Its Climate Exposure Rating runs on a standardized A to G scale (A is climate-resilient, G is structurally vulnerable), combines physical and transition components, and is forward-looking offering various time horizons from 2035 to the end of an asset's operational life. Each grade is benchmarked against a stable universe of more than 6,000 private infrastructure assets across 25 countries, and the methodology is deliberately transparent, with no black boxes.

The physical lens asks what a changing climate does to the asset itself. For the Schwarze Pumpe plant, the answer is reassuring. Its headline physical exposure rating is A, the most resilient grade, with asset-equivalent damage of just 0.09%. What little exposure there comes mainly from manageable flood risk, with heat stress limited.

However, the model flags one hazard that needs monitoring: drought. It rates F, with water demand projected to be four times the available supply and drought conditions covering three months of the year, for an asset that, like much heavy industry, depends on water. That signal does not yet include a financial damage figure because a peer-reviewed drought damage function is still being developed, but it is a real exposure that the model is flagging for the future.

The transition lens asks a different question: how does the asset perform as the economy decarbonizes? Here, the same plant tells a starkly different story. Under a net-zero pathway toward 2035, it rates G, the worst grade on the scale. The pressure intensifies sharply from around 2030, driven by Germany's legislated coal phase-out under the KVBG, with projected revenue approaching near-total devaluation. Both sub-components sit at the bottom of the scale: direct carbon costs, as carbon prices climb toward roughly $700 a tonne under net zero, up from today's levels near $76, and market demand, which collapses to the point of total demand destruction. On this trajectory, the asset is, in effect, stranded.

To be fair to LEAG, this is not a company simply waiting to shut down. Backed by the federal government, it is already planning an 850-megawatt hydrogen-ready gas plant at the same site to replace half of the retiring coal capacity. That is a genuine transition story, and exactly the kind of forward plan the modeled lenses are built to weigh.

These grades are not abstract scores. They translate physical and transition exposure into comparable financial metrics, such as annualized expected damage and revenue at risk, projected forward to 2050 and beyond, so one asset can be weighed against thousands of others on the same terms.

Taken together, these long-term perspectives paint a nuanced picture. The Schwarze Pumpe plant is physically resilient today, yet its economic model faces a steep, policy-driven decline within the decade.

What they don't capture is what may already be unfolding around the asset right now.

Scientific Climate Ratings already offers Climate Risk Ratings (CRR), the next step beyond the Climate Exposure Rating (CER) featured here. Where the CER quantifies climate exposure and potential average annualized damage, the CRR translates it directly into impact on key financial metrics: revenues, cash flows, probability of default, and enterprise value. The step from 'how exposed is this asset?' to 'what does this cost?' in the financial language that investment committees can act on. 

The Signal View: Controversy and Regulatory

Now switch to the lenses that focus on the present: controversy and regulatory. 

Both are the domain of SESAMm, which uses AI to detect ESG controversies on private assets, often before they surface in traditional ratings. Drawing on one of the industry's largest data lakes, it reads more than 35 billion documents (news, regulatory filings, local press, NGO, and court reports) and distills them into a Controversy Exposure Score on a 0 to 100 scale. Individual events are aggregated into cases, each with a timeline, its sources, and a severity rating that reflects how material the issue is: financially, legally, and by the number of stakeholders affected.

The controversy lens, then, monitors how the outside world is responding to an asset in real time, surfacing meaningful developments as they emerge.

For LEAG, that real-time read is substantial. The operator carries a high Controversy Exposure Score spanning environmental, social, and legal topics. There is proven legal action against one of its mining operations, flagged at the highest severity as a potential UN Global Compact violation, alongside criminal complaints over environmental breaches and a record of legal, regulatory, and community pressure built up over the years. A notable cluster of those signals concerns water, both consumption and pollution, including challenges and complaints over groundwater pumping and water permits.

That last point is telling. Recall the drought exposure the physical model flagged but could not yet price. Here it is, already materializing as legal and community pressure on the ground, picked up in real time. None of this appears in a physical climate model or a transition scenario, yet each development can influence permitting timelines, financing conditions, operational flexibility, or reputation.

This is where real-time signals become especially valuable. Controversies often emerge long before they are reflected in annual ratings or financial models. Public opposition, regulatory investigations, and stakeholder disputes can develop over months or even years before they result in fines, project delays, or impairments.

Alongside controversy monitoring sits the regulatory lens, which captures how policy is evolving and being enforced on the ground. For infrastructure investors, this may include relicensing requirements, water rights, environmental compliance, or expanded disclosure obligations such as the CSRD. In many ways, the regulatory perspective bridges long-term transition trends with today's operational reality.

These lenses answer a different set of questions from climate models. Rather than forecasting where the asset is heading decades from now, they reveal what requires attention today.

Four Lenses, One Richer Understanding

The Schwarze Pumpe plant is, at the same time, physically resilient, economically stranded on a net-zero path, and under active legal, regulatory, and community pressure today.

Each lens highlights a different aspect of the same asset, operating across different timescales and using different types of information. Physical and transition analysis explain long-term structural resilience and exposure. Controversy and regulatory monitoring reveal how emerging issues are unfolding in real time.

It's tempting to combine these perspectives into a single score, but doing so risks losing the context that makes each valuable. The four lenses aren't multiple measurements of the same phenomenon. They're answers to different questions.

Viewed together, however, they become considerably more powerful. The drought finding captures it: a hazard the physical model can flag but not yet price, becomes far easier to weigh once real-time monitoring shows the water-related legal and community pressure already building around the asset. Long-term climate modeling helps investors understand whether a controversy reflects a temporary challenge or an early signal of structural risk. Conversely, real-time controversy and regulatory monitoring provide context for long-term scenarios by indicating whether projected risks are already beginning to materialize.

No single lens tells the whole story.

Together, they provide a far clearer picture of infrastructure risk.

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[SESAMm and Scientific Climate Ratings operate as independent platforms. This analysis reflects a collaborative session designed to illustrate how complementary approaches to climate risk can be combined to provide a holistic risk assessment across both short-term and signals and long-term risks.]

All our best wishes for this new year 2019!

2018 proved to be an eventful year for SESAMm with multiple renowned customers acquired, our A series fundraising campaign, numerous prizes won and milestones reached. Here is a look back at our rewarding year 2018 followed by our next steps for 2019.

Successful market entry in the US and around the world

The rapid growth of the alternative data industry and of SESAMm

As a Fintech company specialized in alternative data for Asset Management, 2018 represented a thrilling year in our industry and 2019 already promises to be even more exciting.

During 2018, after our very first business trip in the United States, our international sales development beyond Europe began accelerating. In just one year, we already signed contracts with multiple clients. These include major hedge funds in the US and a major global trading company managing $100 billion in financial assets and part of the Top 10 in its market. The US market represents a powerful strategic growth driver and we are already preparing to open an office there soon!

SESAMm signed its first contract with a client in Africa: Ipro Investment, renown asset manager established for 25 years specialized in emerging markets. Finally, we also signed a contract with our first Japanese client, Nikko Global Wrap, one of the subsidiaries of Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management which is a major asset manager in Japan managing JPY 1.7 trillion.

Strengthening and developing our position in Europe

At the European level, SESAMm has also extended its customer portfolio:

• Groupama AM: new major clients and leading French Asset Management players managing €103 billion Asset under Management (AuM);
• Société Générale: leading French bank present all over the world;
• Raiffeisen Bank International: one of the leading banks in Europe with more than 50,000 employees servicing over 16.5 million customers and possessing around 2,400 business outlets;
• GT Patrimoine : the largest consulting and private management firm in the Lorraine area and based in France for 12 years.

In addition, after our 1st successful collaboration, a new contract was signed with Candriam, leading Asset Management firm and members of the New York Life Group, managing more than $112 billion AuM worldwide.

We are very proud to see how much traction we gained in just a year. The growing use and interest in alternative data for the Asset Management industry, both for quantitative and fundamental funds and asset managers, lead us to prepare for new opportunities of growth & business development.

Cutting edge solutions to respond to market needs

Big Data & AI for Cryptocurrencies

Our first cryptocurrency project began in early 2018. Initially, we started tracking the evolution of the most popular cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) and we analyzed their social data to produce social sentiment & emotions indicators. These indicators have since been integrated into our visualization platform of market sentiment, L’Humeur des Marchés.

This led us to establish a unique partnership based on L’Humeur des Marchés with NapoleonX, a major player as the leading French cryptocurrency manager: the first sentiment and emotion cryptocurrencies analysis destined for the general public. Since then, ETH and BTC sentiment, emotions & opinion value from SESAMm has been available to individual investors and the general public on NapoleonX platform.

The evolution of L’Humeur des Marchés

Our platform L’Humeur des Marchés is an essential tool to guide companies in their investments. During 2018, multiple improvements were added into L’Humeur des Marchés to further enhance its insights & analytics. For example, users have now the possibility to build automated strategies which can generate daily trading signals. Multiple new features were also added such as a strategic backtesting system, daily alerts with 3 years of history and day+1 signal to forecast market movements giving asset managers an edge over competitors.

"L'humeur des marchés" is SESAMm's data visualization platform to analyze market sentiment & emotion for asset management

L’Humeur des Marchés, our data visualization platform

Finally, additional filters have been added to better study & analyze market sentiment: there are now 6 different filters for data sources (sort by sources from web & press, news, blogs, discussions, social trading or all of them) and 9 languages covered (sort by English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, German or all of them). These new filters allow for a wider and more accurate coverage of assets, leading to improved tools & insights for investment decision.

Global recognition & awards for SESAMm

To accomplish our worldwide ambitions, we have started being more and more present abroad, especially at international events. They represent great occasions to promote SESAMm, demonstrate the unique benefits and advantages brought by our technologies & solutions and finally create business opportunities.

This year, we participated in many international events in the US and in Japan, including New York and Hong Kong for Eagle Alpha’s Alternative Data event, Canada, Africa and even London at the French Fintech Tour.

Having been selected for unique international awards reinforces our confidence in the benefits of our solutions for the Asset Management industry, for example with “Talk data to me” by Neudata, Elevator Lab Competition, and Groupama’s award “Créateur de confiance” (Trust Creator) among others.

SESAMm won the pitch "Talk data to Me" of Alternative Data Summit event by Neudata

SESAMm pitch “Talk Data to Me” winner during Alternative Data Summit by Neudata

Moreover, SESAMm has competed in several acceleration programs, in which we were selected in the following ones:

• Fintech Business Camp Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government accelerator program by Invest Tokyo and powered by Accenture;
• Elevator Lab, Acceleration program of Raiffeisen Bank International where SESAMm competed and was selected;
• French Tech Tour America, IMPACT USA’s program to prepare and discover North America’s markets & opportunities;  
• Pass French Tech, La French Tech’s highly selective program for hyper-growth startups & companies.

SESAMm’s plans for 2019: recruitment, development and growth

This year, we are very proud to see our team grow so much in so little time: we had 16 collaborators at the beginning of January 2018 and we are now a team of 28 members! Talented profiles have joined SESAMm team with NLP, AI & Quant engineers & experts from world-renowned schools. New collaborators will join SESAMm in the first quarter of 2019 and we are still recruiting in various fields such as Data Science, Quantitative Analysis, IT and Natural Language Processing among others. You can find all our offers on our dedicated page SESAMm Career!

Following our international success, especially in the US and in Japan, we are now preparing to open an office in the US in the following months and are already considering this option for Japan. Next month’s promise to be exciting and we will be participating in multiple events such as AI & Data Science for trading in New York in March, Machine Learning in Quant Finance by GFMI in April, and many events & conferences on alternative data, data science, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data for Asset Management around the world.

As you can see, 2018 represented SESAMm an exceptional year for its growth with new customers, including global companies, technological improvements for our solutions & services and a bigger and even more motivated team! Our major event in 2018 was the accomplishment of a €2.6 million Series A fundraising campaign, which enabled us to continue our international development, mainly in America and Asia, and the recruitment of many profiles. 2019 will represent another step for SESAMm to become a leading company in the alternative data solutions in the world. Stay tuned: SESAMm news will arrive soon!