SESAMm is pleased to announce that Nathalie Wallace is joining our Advisory Board. Nathalie brings more than 20 years of experience at the intersection of investment management, sustainability strategy, and executive leadership. She has built a career helping global investment organizations integrate sustainability into investment decision-making and capital allocation.

Commenting on the appointment, Sylvain Forté, CEO of SESAMm, said, “Nathalie brings a rare combination of investment experience, strategic vision, and deep understanding of how sustainability considerations translate into real-world investment decisions. Her perspective will be invaluable as SESAMm continues to support financial institutions navigating increasingly complex risk and regulatory environments.”

She previously served as Chief Sustainability Officer at Edmond de Rothschild, where she contributed to the firm’s sustainability strategy across asset classes. Prior to that, Nathalie was Global Head of Sustainable Investment at Natixis Investment Managers, where she was a member of the executive, investment, and seed committees, chaired the CSR–Sustainable Investment committee, and served on the boards of Mirova and Ostrum Asset Management. Earlier in her career, she was Global Head of Strategy and Business Development at Mirova, supporting its growth and positioning as a leading sustainable investment platform.

As Senior Advisor to SESAMm, Nathalie will support the company’s strategic direction, bringing her perspective on sustainable finance, investor expectations, and the evolving role of data and AI in risk analysis and investment processes.

“SESAMm’s approach to risk and sustainability intelligence reflects how investment teams are evolving their processes,” said Nathalie Wallace. “I’m excited to contribute my perspective as the firm continues to support investors with timely, decision-relevant insights.”

We are delighted to welcome Nathalie to SESAMm and look forward to working together as we continue to support financial institutions with forward-looking risk and sustainability insights.

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.

Geopolitical events can quickly create ripple effects across global trade routes, supply chains, and corporate operations. For investors, commercial banks, insurers, and other organizations, identifying which portfolio companies or counterparties are exposed to these developments is a real challenge, especially when monitoring large universes of public and private companies.

SESAMm's thematic keyword search enables analysts to quickly discover controversies related to specific topics or emerging events across thousands of companies. This functionality allows them to filter results by theme without having to manually review large volumes of news and event data.

This functionality is particularly valuable when monitoring rapidly evolving geopolitical situations. To assess exposure related to the current conflict involving Iran, for example, users can run a thematic search across a broad company universe using keywords such as: Iran, Hormuz, and Suez Canal.

These keywords capture references to critical geopolitical locations and maritime chokepoints that may affect global shipping routes, energy markets, cybersecurity risks, and broader operational disruptions. Keywords can be tailored to any geopolitical scenario. Users can start broad and refine as the situation develops, or combine location-based terms with event-specific language to narrow results to the most relevant controversies.

When applied across a large company universe, the dashboard surfaces a range of related controversies ranked by severity. From high-intensity cases like escalating tensions around Iran's Bushehr Nuclear Plant, to medium-intensity signals such as retaliatory actions targeting US banks, offering clear visibility into which companies may face the highest risks.

Zooming In on Company-Level Exposure: The Example of Amazon

Alternatively, analysts can also use the same keyword approach to filter controversies associated with a specific company. This helps determine whether a particular portfolio holding, borrower, or insured entity may be affected by the same geopolitical developments.

Applying this search to Amazon, for instance, surfaces a high-intensity case titled "AWS Data Centers Targeted by Drone Attacks in UAE and Bahrain." The case, rated 4/5 in severity and drawing on over 200 related news events, describes significant damage to AWS infrastructure in the UAE and Bahrain following attacks attributed to Iran, prompting AWS to advise clients to migrate services.

This kind of signal carries real weight for financial institutions. For investors, it highlights operational and geopolitical risks affecting a major technology provider. For banks and insurers, it may point to infrastructure vulnerabilities, operational disruption risks, or broader geopolitical tensions affecting clients' critical systems.

From Geopolitical Events to Portfolio Risk Signals

Geopolitical events rarely affect just one company. For financial institutions monitoring thousands of entities, they create complex, evolving risk exposures across entire portfolios, lending books, and insurance coverage.

Thematic keyword searches help bridge this gap, connecting macro-level developments to company-level controversies quickly and systematically. By combining automated controversy detection with flexible search capabilities, analysts can rapidly identify relevant signals, investigate affected companies, and prioritize follow-up work.

In practice, this means moving faster from emerging geopolitical events to actionable risk insights. Whether the trigger is a conflict in the Middle East, sanctions on a major economy, or rising tensions around a critical shipping lane, the same approach applies, giving investors, banks, and insurers a systematic way to stay ahead of geopolitical risk across their entire portfolio.

When Northern Trust Asset Management walked away from Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) and Climate Action 100+ in early 2025, it framed the move as a routine response to a shifting political landscape. In July 2026, that decision had a price tag: UK charity endowment Nesta Trust pulled a £120 million ($160 million) equity mandate from Northern Trust and handed it to Amundi, the European asset manager that stayed in both coalitions.

Nesta Trust didn't bury the reasoning. It called the switch a "direct consequence" of Northern Trust's exit, and its CIO was blunt about the intent: to show other asset owners that they don't have to "silently accept a roll-back of climate commitments."

Not an isolated incident

Northern Trust is the latest name on a growing list of managers losing business over the same issue. Since early 2025, several asset owners have reallocated capital away from managers that stepped back from climate coalitions:

• Dutch pension fund PFZW pulled roughly €29 billion ($34 billion combined with LGIM) from BlackRock and LGIM as part of a sustainability-focused shift.
• PME, another Dutch pension fund, later withdrew a further €5.9 billion from BlackRock, again citing climate misalignment.
• The UK's The People's Pension moved £28 billion away from State Street to Amundi and Invesco over sustainability concerns.
• Denmark's Akademiker Pension pulled a DKK 3.2 billion mandate from State Street for similar reasons.

The pattern is consistent: US managers exited climate coalitions largely in response to domestic political and legal pressure, including a multistate antitrust lawsuit targeting ESG-focused investment groups. European asset owners, operating under different regulatory expectations and client demands, are responding by moving assets to managers who held the line.

Why this matters beyond the headline

For risk and ESG teams, the lesson isn't about picking a side in the US-Europe ESG divide. Instead, it's that a governance decision made for one audience can create material commercial exposure with another. Northern Trust's exit was a defensible response to conditions in its home market, but that still cost the firm a nine-figure mandate.

Coalition memberships and public commitments used to be treated as background credentials, not something clients actively screened for. However, asset owners are now treating a manager's stewardship posture as a live signal, and they're willing to act on it.

NZAM officially relaunched on February 25, 2026, with softer requirements (the updated commitment dropped references to the 2050 net zero investment goal) and without most large US managers. More than 250 asset managers, including Amundi, signed on. The managers who didn't rejoin are now operating with a visible, trackable gap between their public stance and what a growing subset of clients expect.

The takeaway

Climate coalition membership has become a proxy that a segment of asset owners actively screen for, and reversing course is now a reputational event with a dollar figure attached. Whether that logic holds up for managers with less European or sustainability-focused client exposure is a separate question. But for those who do, the message from this string of mandate losses is clear: walking back a public commitment doesn't just draw criticism, it costs money..

SESAMm helps ESG, risk, and secondaries teams monitor and screen for ESG and reputational risk across public and private companies, drawing on a data lake of 30+ billion documents in 100+ languages. Screening criteria, whether regulatory (SFDR, EU Taxonomy), LP-driven, or values-based, are fully customizable to a firm's own policy. Learn more about SESAMm's approach to controversial business involvement screening and secondaries exclusion diligence.