CUBE ESG Conference 2021
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Are emerging regulations just the tip of the iceberg?
Emerging ESG can no longer be ignored, but how can financial services navigate impending ESG regulations and expectations, and how deep will they go?
Over the past few years, global bodies – from governments to financial regulators – have issued guidance, policies, consultations and regulations aimed at tackling environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors.
For financial services, ESG focus has emerged slowly but is picking up pace. However, current developments are only the tip of a far bigger ESG iceberg.
CUBE’s ESG Conference 2021 explored the emerging landscape around ESG within financial services. The conference drew on industry voices to explore the motivating factors as well as practical tips about how to get ESG right (and how to avoid getting it wrong).
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Speakers

Alice Hill
Senior Fellow for Climate Change Policy, Council on Foreign Relations and previously serving as Special Assistant to President Barack Obama

Dr Sabine Dittrich
Global Head of Regulatory Intelligence at UBS Asset Management

Alex Wilkinson
Managing Director, Global Strategies Ltd

Shaun Wong
AVP, ESG Product Line Management, MetricStream

Barrie Ingman
Financial Regulatory Lawyer at Citi Group and award-winning thought leader, specializing in financial services regulation

Kim Strand
Head of Fundamental Research and ESG Integration, Franklin Templeton

Richard Maton
Managing Director, Aperio Strategy

Ben Richmond
CEO and Founder, CUBE

Stephanie Sfakianos
Director, Chasecutter Ltd and previously, Head of Sustainable Capital Markets, BNP Paribas

Jay Wolstenholme
Research Director at Chartis Research and previously a Senior Analyst at Celent

Esther Rawling
Director at PWC

Greg Davies
Head of Behavioral Risk, Oxford Risk – Expert in applied behavioral finance, decision science, impact investing and FinTech

Stacy Swann
CEO and Founding Partner, Climate Finance Advisors

Chris Leong
Director, Leong Solutions Limited
Agenda
Opening address
Speaker: Ben Richmond, CEO and Founder of CUBE
Time: 1:30pm – 1:50pm GMT | 9:30am – 9:50am EST
Ben Richmond founded CUBE in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. Ben saw that the future of regulation for financial services was set to change, and would be rooted in immense volumes of rules, regulations and regulatory content.
The emerging regulatory landscape for ESG is the latest in a string of developments that see financial services adapting to be more sustainable, better governed and ensuring longevity now, and for the future.
In his opening address, CUBE CEO and Founder, Ben Richmond, will discuss the volume and velocity of regulatory change – and consider how financial services can develop a model to manage risk long into the future.
Opening keynote: The emergence of ESG and the evolving regulatory landscape
Speaker: Barrie Ingman, Financial Regulatory Lawyer at Citi Group
Time: 1:50pm – 2:30pm GMT | 9:50am – 10:30am EST
Barrie Ingman has 20 years of experience predicting, managing, and implementing financial regulations. In his latest role as regulatory lawyer for Citi Group, Barrie has had to contend with the fast-evolving regulatory environment surrounding ESG. ESG is an area that Barrie knows well, having written several authoritative articles on the topic, including a regulatory overview of ESG for FactSet.
In this opening keynote, Barrie will introduce us to the three tenets of ESG – Environmental, Social and Governance: Where do they come from? How have they evolved over the past few years? And why is it now, in 2021, that they have firmly earned themselves a place on the regulatory agenda.
As well as this, Barrie will explain how he’s seen the regulatory environment around ESG evolve over the past few years – and offer experience-led insights on what financial organisations are doing to contend with it.
Barrie will be welcoming questions from the audience.
What investor behaviour tells us about emerging ESG products and portfolios
Speaker: Greg Davies, Head of Behavioral Risk, Oxford Risk
Time: 2:30pm – 3:10pm GMT | 10:30am – 11:10pm EST
Using behavior-led insights, Greg will explain the importance of understanding individual investor preferences for ESG alongside more traditional risk and liquidity preferences. Not only is this increasingly required by regulators, but it is vital if the industry is going to a) develop products and solutions that meet what investors want, and b) unlock the latent demand for ESG by personalizing portfolios and narratives.
Drawing on Oxford Risk’s extensive global research and data, Greg will explore emerging investor preferences and the essential dimensions on which they differ, plus how a range of profiling tools is driving hyper-personalization of ESG solutions to individual investors at scale.
Responsible innovation: reconsidering emerging tech to meet ESG credentials
Speaker: Chris Leong, Director Leong Solutions Ltd and Fellow at ForHumanity
Time: 2:30pm – 3:10pm GMT | 10:30am – 11:10pm EST
Digital is fundamentally about data. The Big Tech firms understood the power and value of data. Transformative technology that enables insights from data to be harnessed at scale has evolved to the point where they are accessible by organizations. This has driven digital transformations over the recent years, enabling established organizations to aspire to be digital-first organizations. Technology alone is not enough, hence studies have found that around 70% of digital transformations fail.
Equally, the ever-increasing reports of adverse outcomes from the use of AI and autonomous systems have demonstrated that organizations deploying these systems into the real world have not managed and mitigated their downside risks. Privacy-related issues have also manifested themselves in these outcomes.
Trading off the pace of innovation with the need to ensure that innovation is executed responsibly is a reflection of the organization’s culture. Organization leaders need to reconsider how their use of emerging technology such as AI and autonomous systems are deployed to process personal data so that they can innovate responsibly, as it impacts their ESG credentials.
Practical steps for ESG: How to embed sustainability across a global financial organisation
Speaker: Stephanie Sfakianos, Director at Chasecutter Ltd, previously Head of Sustainable Capital Markets at BNP Paribas
Time: 3:20pm – 3:55pm GMT | 11.20am – 11:55am EST
Over a 5 year period at BNP Paribas, Stephanie created a team dedicated to sustainable capital markets, with a view to structure and distribute bonds with environmental benefits. In this capacity, Stephanie drove processes integrating sustainability considerations into the daily activities of the global markets business and oversaw the fast-growing green/social/sustainable bond franchise, before being promoted to a more strategic role advising the bank’s key issuing and investing clients on sustainable finance.
In this session, Stephanie will draw from her experience to provide practical steps on how to embed the principles of sustainability across a financial organization: what do companies need to do to avoid ‘greenwashing’ and implement sustainability successfully?
Stephanie will be welcoming audience questions about her experience.
How ESG regulation is driving business transformation
Speaker: Esther Rawling, Director at PWC
Time: 3:20pm – 3:55pm GMT | 11.20am – 11:55am EST
ESG and, more specifically, climate risk is now a priority for many financial institutions. In her experience, Esther has seen this from the volume of clients that are setting increasingly ambitious decarbonization targets at an unprecedented pace in recent months. At the forefront of her clients’ minds are how to transform their businesses to meet these ambitious targets. Esther works with banks helping them to understand how to respond to the numerous challenges posed by the plethora of ESG regulations
In this session, Esther will discuss the challenges that firms are grappling with in light of the evolving ESG regulatory landscape and how this is driving business transformation.
Esther will be welcoming audience questions about her experience.
Panel discussion: The challenges of ESG (and how to overcome them)
Speakers: Panel hosted by Jay Wolstenholme, comprising Kim Strand, Dr Sabine Dittrich and Alex Wilkinson
Time: 3:55pm – 4:40pm GMT | 11:55am – 12:40pm EST
In this panel discussion, we’ll hear from the people managing ESG factors within established financial organizations. From compliance officers to regulatory specialists, the panel will discuss the challenges that ESG poses, and give real-life examples of how they’re looking to overcome them, including:
- Ideology v Profitability – the challenge of ‘E’ in ‘ESG’. How can a firm implement environmental awareness and sustainability internally, while simultaneously offering products that appeal to investors?
- Managing ESG expectations. With pressure from customers, governments and regulators increasing, some compliance and legal teams are devoting 60% of their workload to managing ESG. What are these mounting pressures and how are our panel members tackling them
- ESG and technology. We look at the technology that currently exists to manage ESG – from green investment tech to regulatory change management RegTechs. We’ll hear how our panellists are using technology to manage the current challenges of ESG and ask what their dream solution would look like.
The panel will be welcoming audience questions.
The future of ESG: Where do we think ESG is going and why is it relevant?
Speakers: Shaun Wong | AVP, ESG Product Line Management, MetricStream
Time: 3:55pm – 4:40pm GMT | 11:55am – 12:40pm EST
Closing address: Risk mitigation is not enough
Speaker: Alice Hill – David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment (Previously special assistant to Barack Obama and Senior Director for Resilience Policy on the National Security Council)
Time: 4:40pm – 5:15pm GMT | 12:40pm – 1:15pm EST
The way that we assess and predict risk is not founded in what might actually occur, but instead on what has happened in the past. This is something that Alice Hill describes as a “failure of imagination”. We saw this play out over the course of the global pandemic – but it is also something that extends to our response to the three pillars of ESG, especially the ‘environmental’ element.
Having had responsibility for climate adaptation and catastrophic risk for the Obama administration, Alice will draw on her experience to explain how financial services must adapt to manage the emerging risks of climate change. Drawing on ideas of “preparedness”, Alice will set out the future landscape of the “E” for ESG and explain how risk mitigation is no longer enough.
Final remarks
Speaker: Cathy Calver, Chief Marketing Officer, CUBE
Time: 5:15pm – 5.20 GMT | 1:15pm – 1.20 EST