The Opportunities and Challenges in Leveraging Sustainable Finance Taxonomies

Suddenly in recent years, the world of sustainable finance has become transfixed with Taxonomies, which classify financial securities and activities as 'green' (sometimes even light green or dark green). With the EU Green Taxonomy leading the way, over 30 green taxonomies now exist - mainly developed by international financial regulators & standards bodies. Yet, whilst finance for a long time has worked with a variety of taxonomies, such as industrial sector classification schemes, for the vast majority of the sustainable finance community, these taxonomies remain an untapped resource, poorly understood and underutilized.

In this talk, James & Dan will share their practical experiences of working with the various sustainable finance taxonomies, the direction the space is headed in as well as touching on some of the use cases Neural Alpha are delivering utilizing taxonomies within Knowledge Graph powered Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other applications.

James Phare founded Neural Alpha to bring Connected Data solutions to the financial sector with a particular focus on sustainable investing. He has a track record of delivering innovative data solutions having consulted extensively at many of the world's largest Investment Banks, Mutual Funds and Hedge Funds. Prior to Consulting he was Head of Data at Man Group plc following roles at Thomson Reuters. James is also the founding Director of Connected Data London and holds a Bachelors Degree in Economics & Economic History from the University of York.

Daniel Burke-Ward joined Neural Alpha following his Master's in International Development Studies at Utrecht University where his thesis focused upon on Social Forestry Policy in Indonesia. Dan has experience working at NGOs connected to forestry, foundations investing in impact, and startups working with due-diligence & open source data. As an ESG researcher at Neural Alpha, Dan is exploring his interest in the connections between the environment and finance and is helping to build high-quality data-driven products that help decision makers make the right call. In his spare time he plays squash, climbs, and linguistically stumbles his way through living in Sweden.

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