Cognizant and Alveo win ESG Award

1 November 2022 – On October 12th, Cognizant’s ESG Data Source solution powered by Alveo’s technology has won the Best Data Management solution for ESG in A-Team Group’s inaugural ESG Insight Awards 2022.

Cognizant and Alveo jointly offer a comprehensive Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data management solution to the financial services industry. The collaboration offers firms the ability to operationalize ESG data and integrate it into their business processes. Speaking about the awards, Angela Wilbraham, CEO at A-Team Group, commented: “Our first ESGi Awards have been extremely popular and highly competitive. Thank you to everyone who entered the awards, and congratulations to this year’s winners.”

Cognizant provides data operations and technology services to support the implementation and management of Alveo’s ESG Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. Alveo’s technology has built-in capabilities exclusive to the financial services industry, including mappings between data sources and regulatory requirements. Its platform provides clients with an overview of data operations as well as the ability to query and investigate ESG data, including complete lineage. Alveo has built out its extensive library of off-the-shelf integration with ESG content providers which can be supplemented with its data quality management, data derivation and data analytics capabilities to augment data sets and enable customers to create proprietary metrics.

The importance of financial institutions better understanding the sustainability profile of investment products and portfolios has been quickly growing worldwide. This is principally being driven by investor demand for transparency, as well as new regulations, such as the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR).

Earlier this year, Alveo research uncovered that although firms rank screening organizations as a top driver for using ESG data, regional priorities differ. Regulation is a driver but new product development, asset allocation and client reporting are at least as critical. Lack of corporate disclosures forces asset managers to cast a wide net for ESG data with firms using an average of nearly ten ESG sources. Improving ESG Data Management is a top priority as firms address ESG data challenges to overcome data availability, comparability, usability and workflow integration. Data-as-a-Service is clearly preferred as a service delivery model.

One of the biggest challenges is to incorporate ESG data into decision making workflows across a business. ESG is not just another regulatory reporting exercises as ESG use cases range from product development, asset allocation, benchmarking, client reporting and SFDR compliance on the buy-side to client onboarding, climate stress testing and the upcoming ‘green asset ratio’ on loan books for EU banks using the taxonomy for the sell side. Different departments need to be on the same page and need easy access to ESG data. Inventorying consuming applications and requirements of the different stakeholders is therefore an essential part of onboarding to our data management services.

*Please note: This press release was originally published under Alveo Technologies. As of the publication date, Alveo Technologies is now known as Prime EDM under Gresham. Any prior Alveo content has been updated to reflect Gresham's current branding and offerings.