CUBE ESG Conference 2021

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Speakers: Shaun Wong | AVP, ESG Product Line Management, MetricStream

Time: 3:55pm – 4:40pm GMT | 11:55am – 12:40pm EST

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.

Speaker: Cathy Calver, Chief Marketing Officer, CUBE

Time: 5:15pm – 5.20 GMT | 1:15pm – 1.20 EST