Happy April!

It was nice to connect with you last month. Here’s where you can find us again this month.

CeFPro: ESG Europe Summit

Alexandre Tiesset, Head of ESG at SESAMm, will give a presentation on the stakeholder's feedback and its role in a company’s ESG strategy.

Feel free to reach out to Andrew Bernstein, Leo Shamash, and Alexandre Toussaint at the conference to learn more about us.

Event details: https://www.cefpro.com/esg-europe/

📅 April 18–19, 2023

📍 London

TSAM ESG New York

Connect with Dave Anspach, who will be at the conference.

Event details: https://tsam.foxonmedia.com/esg-new-york/

📅 April 19, 2023

📍 New York

Asia Startup Summit

Juliette Fafa and Thibaut Gunsey will join the conference virtually. Feel free to reach out to them and schedule a meeting to learn more about our ESG technologies.

Event details: https://www.ccifrance-international.org/evenements/evenements-a-venir/e/asia-startup-summit-2023

📅 April 20, 2023

📍 Virtual (Singapore)

Stay connected

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest event information? Connect with us on social media:

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• Twitter

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.

For nearly three decades, the world has annually witnessed an event of critical importance for the future of our climate: the Conferences of the Parties, better known as the COP. First held in 1995 following the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, these conferences bring together nations that have ratified this treaty in a collective effort to combat climate change, a phenomenon increasingly evident in our daily lives.

Among these conferences, two stand out for their significant impact. The first COP3, held in Kyoto in 1997, marked a turning point with the near-unanimous adoption of the Kyoto Protocol. This agreement, which came into force in 2005 after intense negotiations, mandated signatories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5% by 2012. Despite its legally binding nature, some countries attempted to diminish its ambition, and others, like the United States, never ratified it. Canada withdrew from the treaty in 2011, citing the discovery of highly polluting tar sands in Alberta. At the 2012 Doha conference, the Kyoto Protocol was extended until 2020 despite the absence of the US agreement.

COP15, held in Copenhagen in 2009, acknowledged for the first time the necessity of limiting global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels and proposed the creation of a Green Climate Fund endowed with 100 billion US dollars annually until 2020. Unfortunately, this initiative lacked legal enforcement and clear rules for fund allocation. By 2014, after the Lima conference, the Green Climate Fund had only amassed 10 billion US dollars.

Then came COP21 in 2015 in Paris, one of the most well-known conferences, which led to the landmark Paris Climate Agreement. This agreement set three primary goals:

1. Limit Temperature Rise: Keep the global temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
2. Adapt to Climate Impacts: Enhance the ability of countries to adapt to climate change impacts, focusing on resilience and adaptive capacity, especially in vulnerable regions.
   
3. Align Financial Flows: Redirect financial flows towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development, ensuring consistent support for mitigation and adaptation.

Once again, the agreement was not, or only minimally, binding: Participant countries were encouraged to define their "Nationally Determined Contributions" to be re-evaluated and submitted to the UN every five years, with each submission expected to be more ambitious than the last. The only legal obligation was the transparency of national contributions and their evaluation by experts.

The Paris Agreement, however, paved the way for landmark climate litigation, including a significant case in the Netherlands where a foundation sued the Dutch government for reducing its climate ambitions. The government lost, with the European Convention on Human Rights forming the legal basis of the decision.

From Words to Deeds: The Struggle for Effective Climate Change Policies at COP28

The climate is a highly complex system with significant inertia; actions taken today might only manifest their effects in a century! As of 2020, global warming is estimated to be around +1.2°C, with an increase of approximately +0.2°C per decade.

Current policies are steering us toward a +3°C increase, underscoring the need for a COP that results in a binding agreement backed by major powers and supported by financial measures. Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon had suggested a global tax on financial transactions to fund the Green Climate Fund.

There is also hope for new agreements to ban subsidies for fossil fuels. However, the fact that COP28 is set to take place in the United Arab Emirates, chaired by the CEO of the national oil company, sends a mixed message. It is crucial that Gulf countries play a significant role on the international stage, especially given the recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in late 2023, highlighting their pivotal role in both international peace and climate change issues. On the latter, the trajectory is concerning: 181 million tons of oil were extracted in 2022, an increase of nearly 11% in a year, and gas extractions, though stable over the past year, have risen by 9% since 2012.
COP28, therefore, faces legitimate criticism, with the most significant being that the conference could be an exercise in greenwashing. Recent allegations reported by the BBC suggest potential misuse of the COP presidency to secure new oil and gas contracts.

Finally, responsibility contributions remain unresolved: the "Economic North" is primarily responsible for climate change, yet those who will suffer the most are the countries of the "Global South." Some island nations are even at risk of disappearing due to rising sea levels caused by climate change, and certain areas could become uninhabitable by 2050 due to extreme temperatures and humidity, preventing natural cooling processes like sweating. Addressing loss and damage will also be a central point at the conference.

Stay tuned for the second part summarizing the debates and agreements done at COP 28.