Wall Street Frontline｜NASDAQ Randall Hopkins: Use AI to help corporates improve ESG disclosure

ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance. It's a framework that helps stakeholders and investors understand how an organization manages risks and opportunities related to these criteria.

Chinese companies particularly those in high-impact industries such as technology, manufacturing and electronic vehicles are increasingly integrating ESG principles into their business strategies.

The Chinese government has introduced a series of policies and guidelines to promote ESG disclosures and green finance, encouraging companies to improve their environmental performance, social responsibility and governance structures.

As ESG considerations become increasingly important for investors and companies alike, NASDAQ's initiatives play a vital role in shaping sustainable business practices.Today we invited Mr. Randall Hopkins, the head of NASDAQ ESG solutions, to talk about some critical topics.

Wall Street Frontline: So, first question, can you start by giving us an overview of NASDAQ's approach to ESG and why it is a priority right now for the exchange?

Randall Hopkins: Yeah, absolutely, so as an exchange we're certainly focused on connections between investors and Corporates and have always used technology as a way to make that as smooth as possible. With financial disclosures, it's very clear what a particular profile of a company is, and for some of these environmental and social and governance materials, it's harder to understand. So we really feel our role as an exchange is to make that as fluid and as easy as possible for people to understand both the corporate and the investor profile.

Wall Street Frontline: So how is NASDAQ supporting companies listed here in meeting their ESG goals?

Randall Hopkins: Yeah, so there's so much challenge in this space to try to access the information and to be able to understand how to disclose that information and so our approach in using technology is really to be able to decrease the sand in the gears and make it more easy for companies to disclose the information that reflects some of these non-financial value creators for their business.

Wall Street Frontline: Can you share some success stories or examples?

Randall Hopkins: Yeah, so over this past quarter there were a couple that kind of stood out to me. One was a company that used our mapping of all of the government requirements as well as the voluntary ESG disclosures, and they reduced the amount of time it took for them to do that work by about a hundred and fifty hours, and they were able to convert that into focus on their sustainability strategies itself.

And the other example is about how to do this work across a large enterprise.One of the companies we support that has global fabrication facilities throughout Asia was collecting data across the globe and they really needed to find ways to connect more efficiently with those individuals throughout the organization and they were able to use that to create a better sustainability story for their investors and their employees.

Wall Street Frontline: We heard Nasdaq just introduced the AI data platform for ESG. So can you elaborate a little bit more on this platform, like how it works and what it can offer to investors and companies listed here?

Randall Hopkins: Yeah, so our Sustainable Lens platform is really focused on taking the insights that we have gathered over the last couple of decades working in this space and then bringing the power of AI over the top of that to really drive insights around the ability to benchmark, to understand how to set priorities, how to set ideas that would maybe be science-based targets that would allow for a company to be more sustainable over time.

Also it's very important to have access to capital and so a lot of the ways that companies use that kind of insight to set priorities and to be able to align to their investors allows them to really chart a course to that future for their business.

Wall Street Frontline: Did any company listed here already start using the AI platform?

Randall Hopkins: Yeah, we've had some great success stories there you know. I think the ones that kind of stand out are related to how to maybe benchmark against some of the regulatory frameworks that are starting to take hold, whether that's CSRD, whether that's TCFD, a lot of the acronyms that are coming into play and it's very important for companies to understand how their disclosures already are aligning and so we use large language models against 9,000 companies in the platform to really understand where a particular company is disclosing and how they might improve that disclosure to be able to keep up with some of their peers.

Wall Street Frontline: So, looking ahead, how do you see the evolving technological advancements such as artificial intelligence play a more and more important role in shaping the future of ESG?

Randall Hopkins: Yeah, when you think about our technology heritage here at NASDAQ, we really focus on solving discrete problems that are made visible to us from our companies. We have the benefit of working with so many companies, and they're very quick to share with us the challenges that they're facing in the ESG space so it's very easy for us to use technology AI and otherwise to address those challenges and be able to be responsive to those. We're not making new problems; we're solving problems that really are pain points for our customers today.

出品：南方财经全媒体集团 

策划：于晓娜

统筹：向秀芳

记者：周蕊 

翻译&字幕：胡睿哲（实习生）

设计：林军明 廖苑妮