Kensho industry use case: Extraction of SASB data from CSR reports
Kensho's AI Toolkit automates the slow, error-prone work of extracting SASB sustainability data from corporate social responsibility reports.
This blog is part of our series on how Kensho solutions can be used in various industries to unlock insights hidden in messy and unstructured data.
Background
The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) sets rules called SASB standards, which identify environmental, social and governance issues most relevant to financial performance in various industries. The standards are designed to help companies disclose financially material sustainability information to investors.
Investment management companies use this data to compare the company’s SASB performance to an industry-standard metric and calculate their ESG score. This is difficult because the company-specific SASB metrics are typically only found in their Corporate Sustainability or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports rather than databases or data feeds. Currently, investment management companies identify each organization of interest and manually search for the SASB metrics themselves in the Corporate Sustainability Reports.
Use Case Drill Down: How CSR Document extraction fits into the wider industry
Challenges
The process of finding and extracting SASB data from CSR reports is manual and time consuming. Some companies have resorted to tasking their analysts with the process: searching a company of interest, finding and downloading their yearly CSR in PDF format, identifying the SASB metric tables within the document, and then manually copying and pasting the key data.
Solutions
Following is how the Kensho team envisions our tools being implemented for this use case:
Kensho’s AI Toolkit can provide automation and time savings. With Kensho Extract, an analyst can download CSR reports in bulk and extract all the relevant SASB tables into a relational database at scale. Additionally, Extract also makes this data machine readable and enables companies to input the metrics into a relational database or ERP system to help with their investment decisions
Contact us to discuss how Kensho’s tools can help solve your industry challenges.
