As the global climate is rapidly changing, a drastic increase in demand has been seen worldwide for listed companies to disclose their environmental, social and governance (ESG) information. The Hong Kong government has gradually attached more importance to ESG. Relevant regulators have also continually strengthened the promotion of ESG policies and regulations, as well as the implementation of information disclosure legislation. The Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) takes a leading role in green innovation and technology, and launched the “AI ESG Report Analytical Engine” to assist corporations to put their beliefs in sustainability into actions. Today, the GBA Carbon Neutrality Association revealed the first “Top 100 Carbon Neutral Hong Kong Listed Companies” and leveraged the solution which makes automatic extraction from massive data possible and operation efficiency higher.
In the financial industry, there are a massive number of files and reports such as annual reports and ESG reports that come with various complex formats including unstructured or half-structured data, tables, texts, and graphs. To satisfy regulatory compliance audit, reporting and disclosure requirements, a lot of manpower has to be devoted into compilation, categorisation and extraction of specific data. However, this manual review process is not efficient and prone to mistakes. The “AI ESG Report Analytical Engine” developed by ASTRI can automatically collect, extract and analyse key information from a massive number of complicated files and reports. This not only drastically shortens the time required in processing the files, but also automatically analyses and summarises the reports.
The Greater Bay Area Carbon Neutrality Symposium announced today the first “Top 100 Carbon Neutral Hong Kong Listed Companies”, leveraging the “AI ESG Report Analytical Engine” developed by ASTRI as technological support to select the top 100 companies with the highest carbon neutrality ratings. The system could process data from over 2000 HKEC-listed companies’ ESG reports in under two hours, during which the engine automatically extracted and analysed key information, enhancing operation efficiency while reducing manual checking procedures and compliance costs. It may take a few days to even a few months to process such a huge amount of data manually.
On the day of the symposium, green finance experts and smart energy experts from ASTRI attended the roundtable forum and shared about ASTRI’s green technology with around 200 participants who are passionate about carbon neutrality including those from the political and business sectors, academics and professionals.
Innovative features of “AI ESG Report Analytical Engine”
- Deep natural language processing engine: to extract relevant events and entities from texts according to the contexts
- Intelligent document processing: to cope with diversified file formats
- Multimodal information extraction model: to conduct multimodal information extraction
- End-to-end solutions based on deep learning: to improve regulatory technology
Dr. Denis Yip, Chief Executive Officer of ASTRI, said, “Strengthening ESG related disclosure has been a global trend in financial investment. Regulators also encourage more listed and non-listed companies to put ESG disclosure into their operational strategies. ASTRI has been developing and applying cutting-edge technologies, utilizing technology such as artificial intelligence and deep learning to assist financial institutions to improve the efficiency in ESG reports data processing and lower compliance costs when meeting regulatory compliance audit and information disclosure requirements. We expect to cooperate with more organisations and leverage “AI ESG reports analysis” technology to facilitate the development of other regulatory technologies, to support the government in comprehensive promotion of green finance and to expedite achieving Hong Kong’s target of carbon neutrality.”
Mr. Dennis Wu Pak-kit, Founding President of GBA Carbon Neutrality Association, said, “Over the course of a year since establishment, the association has already had deep exchanges with the green finance sectors and influential investors. The industry expects us to be able to provide an authoritative list of carbon neutrality index of Hong Kong listed companies for their reference when making investments, and to develop related financial products afterwards.” The GBA Carbon Neutrality Association was invited to be a member of the Greater Bay Area Green Finance Alliance (GBA-GFA) in October 2022, helping to expand the promotion of related projects to other cities in the Greater Bay Area.