The challenge is part of an initiative by the Global Financial Innovation Network of regulators and related organisations to encourage innovative solutions that will improve trust in the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) driven investment market.
The King’s Business School duo were one of just thirteen teams selected to take part in the TechSprint and were the only university-based team to participate, with the rest of the teams coming from the FinTech sector.
Their entry, the ESG ID app, was developed in collaboration with multiple international regulators. It uses text-mining techniques to identify discrepancies between the voluntary description that funds provide about their ESG commitments in their investment prospectuses, and the more objective measures that can be obtained by analysing information and ratings related to the individual stocks that they hold in their portfolios.