ESG hacking: creating opportunities for sustainable innovation

The event has three specific goals: better data veracity, forward-looking risk, and impact-oriented financial instruments. Ultimately these goals aim for participants to create new sustainability-influenced ways of evaluating risk and allocating capital.

Under the current shadow of COP27, the impetus to create spaces for innovation in ESG technology is greater than ever. A recently published IPCC report estimates that across the next decade climate change will drive 32 – 132 million more people into extreme poverty, create food insecurity, and cause increasingly extreme weather events.

Finextra spoke with Ambar Vitelli, strategic partnerships at NayaOne, a partner of the Hackathon, on their involvement.

Many in the financial community may not be familiar with all the benefits of a collaborative event like this, Vitelli explained that the “hackathon platform provides an environment complete with onboarded tech and datasets to enable participants to build a functional prototype. The platform drives community collaboration and unleashes the power of co-creation to encourage the build and adoption of ESG solutions and drive toward a sustainable future.

Regarding why NayaOne is involved in this event, Vitelli stated: “banks and fintechs have an important role to play in the transition to a green economy as financial intermediaries.” She continued: “investors and consumers are actively demanding active participation from financial institutions and fintechs towards leading and catalysing the transition journey towards a green economy. Regulators across the world are busy implementing climate risk management mandates, climate stress testing and climate-related disclosures for financial institutions.”

For the event to be facilitated, NayaOne has provided its own technology. Vitelli commented on the importance of having this technology: “Participants have access to a DIY sandbox to build their prototypes, which provides participants access to over 500 APIs, more than 100 Datasets, a data science experimentation environment and collaboration and communication features to enhance team coordination for efficiency and effectiveness.”

Vitelli added that “it is incredibly important to equip our developer communities with the tools they require, including datasets, APIs, and a developer environment to ensure we are fostering collaboration and partnership to facilitate build and development toward a greener future.”

Access to this technology helps to produce an ideal environment to nurture innovation in technical prototypes. This creates a great benefit for participants to gain more experience in this area, and focus on something they are interested in. Additionally, Vitelli notes that “winning teams will be taken forward through incubation and investment to help develop the creation of an operational solution for the industry to follow. This an incredible opportunity for teams working towards the MVP stage during the Hackathon especially as VC firms are now diversifying their portfolios with a focus on companies with a strong ESG posture.”

Vitelli concluded by stating that NayaOne is, “incredibly excited to see what teams produce during the event!”

To hear from more experts, register here for Finextra’s fifth Sustainable Finance Live conference and hackathon to take place on 29th November.