Agile Digital

About the Client

ESGTech is a global data management platform that enables the ingestion and disclosure of verifiable ESG data, fostering collaboration between financial institutions, corporates, and advisory firms. They enable an ecosystem where stakeholders are easily engaged in an organisation’s sustainability journey, efficiently tracking and monitoring ESG risk and opportunities through continuous material disclosure.

Circumstance

In a landscape where Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations are becoming integral to the strategic direction of companies worldwide, ESGTech identified a critical gap in the market for a robust, scalable, and secure platform for the management and disclosure of ESG data. The goal was to create a global data management platform, ESGManage, that would enable stakeholders to efficiently track and monitor ESG risks and opportunities through continuous, material disclosure, aligning capital distribution with ESG risk and opportunity pricing.

Action

Application Architecture – We engineered a cloud-native application structure designed for AWS deployment, ensuring scalability, security, and efficiency. This architecture supports continuous integration/delivery, auto-scaling, and modular componentry, enabling rapid adaptation to evolving reporting needs whilst satisfying the requirements of financial services stakeholders and other industry and public participants.

Cloud Architecture – Leveraging AWS cloud services, we implemented an infrastructure that ensures the platform’s robust performance, security, and scalability. This included utilising AWS managed Kubernetes offering to minimise resource use and ensure the platform could handle varying loads seamlessly.

Information Architecture – Our platform was structured to offer a full view of ESG indicators whilst remaining flexible to incorporate additional official indicators and the various ways that customers wish to record and derive metric and to manage their investments according to custom indicators. Employing a directed database to maintain the integrity and verifiability of data, this setup enables the accurate management of ESG performance over time.

Solution Architecture – The design of ESGManage focused on providing a flexible, secure, micro-services solution for ESG data disclosure and management that leveraged cloud-based data storage. By incorporating a Generic Indicator Library and ensuring data maps automatically to various frameworks, we reduced the burden of repeated work. Furthermore, the flexible derivation chains allow customers to define the graph of calculations that will be applied to transform their base metrics into disclosable ones, including a verifiable chain of evidence from collection through aggregation and transformation in the derivation chain and ultimately to disclosure.

Technology Architecture – Our approach created a scalable, secure technology framework that aligned with best practices and international standards. This ensured that it can efficiently handle the ingestion and disclosure of vast amounts of ESG data while remaining adaptable to future technological advancements. In particular, the event driven architecture permits auditing of ingested, calculated and disclosed ESG metrics.

Result

Agile Digital’s architecture and implementation established the basis of an extensible platform for ESGTech. The architecture has enabled ongoing extension and modification to explore and satisfy market needs, whilst remaining cost effective to maintain, operate and extend.

Ethical Behaviour

Throughout the project, our decision-making process was guided by the principles of fairness, honesty, and integrity. Through secure and transparent handling of ESG data, ESGTech upheld the highest standards of ethical behaviour, fostering trust among users and stakeholders. Our commitment to ethical principles has been instrumental in shaping the development and deployment of ESGManage, supporting ESGTech’s mission to transform capital distribution through ESG data.

Sustainability

ESGManage’s design and implementation reflect a deep commitment to sustainability, not only in environmental terms but also in ensuring the economic and social sustainability of the platform’s impact. By enabling continuous disclosure and efficient ESG data management, we are paving the way for more sustainable business practices and investment strategies.