Data Science Special

CXO Insight
The quest for Data-Driven Decision Making in Higher Education
> Howard Miller, CIO, UCLA Anderson School
of Management

Why AI is essential for better patient engagement?

> Annalhees Elm, Regional Vice President
Healthcare Division, Nuance Communications

Lessons in Multi-Cloud Security

> Dave Row, VP of Security Engineering, BillGO

Visual
Synthetic
Data
Generation:
Guglielmo Iozzia
A Paradigm Shift For Associate Director – Data Science, ML/AI, Computer Vision
MSD

Computer Vision
EDITORIAL
Data Science Must Work in all Industry with AI and ML
Overnight, all sectors transformed into a
reservoir of data as the urgency to go digi-
tal took precedence during the pandemic.
In just two years, the industries embraced
trends in data storage, encryption, collec-
tion, maintenance, and visualization that
were otherwise slow to catch up since the
last two decade. But alongside grew other
challenges like unstructured data, secu-
rity loopholes, and disparate IT systems
and applications, exacerbating the risk of
security and admin burnout. IT solution
leaders realized it was time to make data
analytics and data part of the script to fuel
the efforts of IT workers with accuracy
and timeliness to navigate the workforce.
Within the next five years, the number
is expected to triple as more companies
modernize their infrastructure, migrate
to the cloud, use APIs for a wider reach of
clinical apps, and leverage data analytics to
power research initiatives.
Analytics and data are at the nucleus of
life sciences, working in tandem to trans-
form the industry with full-blown digi-
tally-enabled workplace delivery models.
From supply-chain, billings, databases,
business intelligence reports, the role of
data analytics and leading-edge AI and
ML-based solutions help in unlocking
insights, observing patterns, visualizing
data, and automating tasks for productiv-
ity and ROIs. Many public research agen-
cies across the world have also announced
partnerships with industry’s leading big
data analytics companies to facilitate se-
cure data sharing and meet compliance
standards. As a result, IT giants and non
tech companies also have seen a rise in in-
vestments to build applications that easily
reach customers, gain their trust, and ac-
celerate business.
In a nutshell, there are countless oppor-
tunities that the world’s tech community
and systems can expect using modern data
analytics in advanced research, and adher-
ence as well as work from developments.
The end of the manually-driven and lega-
cy data management system marks a new
beginning to brave many global industries.
The new world of data analytics will pro-
mote practices and workflows that bring
parity in all industries and ecosystems with
respect to being more data-driven and re-
mote yet connected experiences for indus-
try staff/users. To catch up on the latest
insights from the experts in data analytics,
read on the CXOTech Magazine’ Data Sci-
ence special issue.
 Data Science 2022 Special

Managing Editor James George

Art Director Steve Johnson

Editorial Staff Luis Jones
Robert Brendan

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responsibility for the opinion expressed thereon.

 Cover Story
VISUAL SYNTHETIC
DATA GENERATION:
A PARADIGM SHIFT FOR
COMPUTER VISION 16
Guglielmo Iozzia,
Associate Director – Data Science, ML/AI, Computer Vision,
MSD
 CONTENTS
20
8 Data is Disrupting Private Credit, Driving the Asset Class Digital

Joshua Masia
Chief Product Officer
The quest for Data-Driven Decision Finitive
Making in Higher Education

Howard Miller

22
CIO
UCLA Anderson School of Management

10 Financial Risk Management (FRM) Application on AWS using Microsoft HPC 2012
Sp3(High Performance Computing) ( 2016-2019)

Kishore Kesanapally
VP of Data Analytics/Data Science/Business
Wells Fargo

Why AI is essential for better patient engagement?

Annalhees Elm
Regional Vice President Healthcare Division
Nuance Communications
24
Enabling a Seamless Customer Experience: The 4 Pillars of Experiential Excellence

12
Waseem Kawaf
Vice President, Global Digital Experience
STANLEY Security

Keeping the Science in Data Science

Tessa Jones
26
VP of Data Science Research & Development
Calligo Lessons in Multi-Cloud Security

Dave Row
Vice President of Security Engineering
BillGO

14
28
Metaverse, Space Travel and the Multitude Possibilities
Ina Wanca & Aakanksha Jadhav
Efficient ESG Data Gouvernance
Vice President: Global Lead AI Solutions
Mastercard Maha Lebbos
Digital Transformation and Information Systems
Fondaction
 THE QUEST FOR DATA-DRIVEN
DECISION MAKING IN
HIGHER EDUCATION
By Howard Miller, CIO, UCLA Anderson School of Management
T
here’s a lot of recent rhetoric and postula-
tion around the subject of data. Some in-
dustry experts have even stated that data
is the new oil. It’s known in 2022 that companies
like Google, Amazon, etc., collect a plethora of
data about us as individuals. In many ways, high-
er education is really not that much different. We
collect data on students, alumni, and employers
as several prominent examples. Additionally, as
IT, we have data in our ticketing systems on fac-
ulty, staff and students that we could hypothet-
ically further analyze to understand trends and
where we can improve and optimize existing
processes.
I’ve been in my current role for a little more than 3
years at UCLA Anderson, and it’s been a priority
since my first month or so to help my institution
make better decisions with data. It sounds pretty
easy in theory, given the premise above and the
amount of data we already have. In fact, the data
itself is the easier part of the equation, as it turns
out. That’s not to suggest that the technology and
approach are seamless. The technology is just the
easier of the two components, which I’ll explain
shortly.
Reducing technical debt and taking a cloud-first
8
approach were also two of my primary initiatives
from the start along with data analytics. We en-
gaged with both AWS and Microsoft from the
start. We knew they were well-equipped to help
us explore some relatively easy and straight-for-
ward use cases to get acclimated to build, store
and analyze data in a cloud-native environment.
We would have been fine with either of these two
companies and their platforms regardless of the
outcome of our pilot use cases. We ended up se-
lecting Microsoft Azure since we were already
primarily a Microsoft shop.
The next challenge after vendor selection was
picking a dataset for which data was readily
available and begin building out a new archi-
tecture and our first data warehouse. It’s been
an eighteen-month labor of love with plenty of
twists and turns, including changes in both our
internal project team as well as managing per-
sonnel changes with our business partner. As it
turns out, we now have a certified data set for our
MBA admissions and a series of dashboards and
visualizations built on top of Azure. We have a
data lake, a data warehouse, and a primary da-
tabase that all sits on top of Azure Synapse. Our
visualizations are built with Power BI. We did
not at the time, nor do we now, have the inter-

Howard Miller
nal expertise or skills that we need to perform
a majority of this work on our own. We even-
tually will. In the meantime, we rely on other
business partners to help us move this initiative
forward.
As we look toward what’s next and how to use
these tools to better understand trends and just
one sliver of the data we already have, we in-
stead need to take a step back. The technology
and the tools themselves are wonderful. As pre-
viously mentioned, the data and the technology
itself, especially where we currently stand, were
the easier part.
We tried to figure out what data to go after next
and, in fact, received some guidance that we
should just pump any dataset we could find into
our ecosystem so we could potentially query
it. All of the advice we were receiving became
quite confusing, in fact, as to what the best ap-
proach for us to proceed might actually be. At
this juncture, it really dawned on me (with some
help from some very valuable strategic consul-
tants) that we really needed to put some addition-
al focus on our key business outcomes to move
ahead. In a Jeopardy-like way, we didn’t clearly
focus on what business questions we were trying
to answer to figure out what data (if we didn’t
already have it) could be loaded next to help us
make better data-driven decisions.
We haven’t loaded any new data as a result. In-
stead, we are on a good path now to develop 20
or so use cases with a solid hypothesis, risks, and
attributes that will help us with data science and
identifying the right data to make the best deci-
sions. As for the technology, this will be transfor-
mative for our business. Some of our peer schools
are ahead of where we are and even have Chief
Data Officers who only focus on dashboards,
trends, etc. With data as the new oil, making keen
business decisions with data is tantamount to our
future success. Ecosystems such as Microsoft
Azure and Power BI are the keys to that kingdom.
As mentioned, the road to this point certainly
has been a bit bumpy. We still aren’t sure exactly
what these new technologies will ultimately cost
us on a daily basis (operating expense) once we’re
fully operational. The cost of doing business in
the cloud actually scares me a bit, I’ve heard too
many stories about runaway queries and rogue,
unbudgeted costs. As previously mentioned, we
also don’t have staffed reskilled (yet) in some of
the underlying technology (e.g., Power BI) or the
actual data science itself to be self-sufficient. With
that said, the engagement of our business stake-
holders on this journey, in terms of their time,
interest and participation in multiple multi-hour
sessions to help us prioritize the most important
business performance indicators, has been truly
outstanding.
9
 WHY AI IS ESSENTIAL FOR BETTER
PATIENT ENGAGEMENT?
By Annalhees Elm,
Regional Vice President Healthcare Division,
Nuance Communications
Annalhees Elm
P
atient expectations of their healthcare
experiences have been growing for sev-
eral years, a trend accelerated by the
disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. The
benchmark is set by leading retailers and
banks, where competitive advantage often
goes to the brand with the best customer ex-
perience.
Just as consumers will switch brands when
they have a poor experience with a retail-
er, patients are increasingly likely to change
health systems if they are dissatisfied.
By using AI-powered patient engagement
solutions, health systems can offer the con-
sumer-grade experiences patients expect,
building stronger relationships with patients,
their families, and their communities. And
these solutions bring additional benefits, al-
leviating clinician workloads, boosting oper-
ational efficiency, and giving patients more
control over how they manage their health.
Improving the patient experience
One of the most effective ways to strength-
en patient relationships is understand-
ing and anticipating what they need
at every stage of their care journey.
Patient engagement solutions should bring au-
10
tomation and orchestration to the entire jour-
ney, delivering consistent, simple experiences
regardless of which channel patients engage in.
Effective engagement is vital from pre-visit
support and coordination of complex appoint-
ments to post-visit education, prescription re-
fills, and online billing. With a comprehensive
platform that adds a conversational AI layer
to every communication between patients
and their health system, they feel known and
understood. They feel more connected to the
organization and their care teams. And they
feel more invested in their care, leading to bet-
ter outcomes.
Helping clinicians focus on care
Burnout is a constant challenge for healthcare
organizations, and one that has been exacer-
bated by the extra workload the pandemic has
put on care teams and support staff. By reduc-
ing the number of inbound questions with
automated outreach, and enabling patients to
resolve routine inquiries through self-service,
health systems can lighten the burden and re-
duce burnout.
Let us look at an example. Too often, patients
attend appointments without the necessary
preparations—maybe they have not got their
most recent images or haven’t had the proper
lab tests—adding more stress for already over-
worked clinicians. With proactive reminders
and helpful information and requests auto-
matically delivered in their channel of choice,
this scenario becomes much less common.
By using AI-powered patient engagement
solutions to keep patients informed and en-
able them to self-serve, health systems can re-
duce unnecessary work for clinicians, can to
focus on care delivery and quality. Effective
self-service and a proactive approach to auto-
mated communications also ease the burden
on support staff, reducing the risk of burnout
across the extended health system team.
Increasing operational efficiency
Patient Access Centers (PACs) are under
enormous pressure to provide outstanding
patient experience while minimizing costs
and handling higher contact volumes. An in-
telligent IVR can be hugely valuable in help-
ing achieve these goals.
Using the latest Natural Language Under-
standing (NLU) and conversational AI tech-
nologies, the best IVR systems allow patients
to state their inquiry in their own words, rath-
er than forcing them to choose from a limited
menu of options.
After seamlessly authenticating patients using
voice biometrics and establishing what they
want to accomplish, a conversational IVR can
complete everyday tasks. That eliminates the
need for PAC agents or front-desk staff to deal
with things like rescheduling appointments,
prescription refills, bill payments, and other
routine tasks. When the IVR receives an in-
quiry it cannot resolve, it can route the caller
to the most appropriate person or team, pro-
viding all the context of the patient’s recent
interactions and the conversation so far.
Data is the key to better patient
engagement
Patient engagement solutions can offer enor-
mous business value to health systems, but
they are only as good as the data they use.
Plenty of AI solutions can understand the
words people say, but effective engagement
depends on systems that can understand the
intent behind those words. Training AI mod-
els to understand hundreds of patient intents
requires data from across the health system—
and that requires collaboration between busi-
ness functions.
Connecting patient engagement solutions to
data from other systems—like EHR, CRM,
and billing systems—also enables automated
resolutions for more intents and the ability to
personalize interactions based on a complete
view of patient information.
The most advanced patient engagement solu-
tions take this data-driven intelligence one
step further, bringing in data from the health
system and other agencies to create a holistic
patient view. This allows the AI to anticipate
patient needs and offer proactive assistance
or recommendations, reducing the need for
incoming contacts and helping improve care
delivery even further. For example, if the sys-
tem understands that a patient does not own
a car, care teams can factor that into decisions
about appointment locations and treatment
plans.
Better outcomes for everyone
By improving patient engagement with
AI-powered solutions, everybody wins.
Healthcare organizations can operate more ef-
ficiently, reduce costs, and strengthen patient
relationships. Clinicians and support staff can
focus on providing care, making the best use
of clinic time, and streamlining patient jour-
neys. And patients can manage their care on
their own terms, increasing accountability
and adherence to treatment plans—and im-
proving care outcomes.
11
KEEPING THE SCIENCE
IN DATA SCIENCE
By Tessa Jones, VP of Data Science Research & Development, Calligo

U
nder the umbrella of data science, ma-
chine learning (ML), artificial intelligence
(AI), and statistical modeling are becoming
ever more necessary to stay competitive. Howev-
er, developing solutions that effectively integrate
with the business and provide measurable val-
ue is no easy task. Many companies try and fail.
Most data science focused tools in the market at-
tempt to automate the development of models,
removing the need for a data scientist at all. This
leaves many companies with a difficult decision;
take a risk with a product in the market and hope
that it can produce something valuable or hire
an expensive army of data scientists to build ev-
erything from scratch. Optimizing data science
solutions is not achieved by removing data sci-
entists from the process, but it can be optimized
by focusing their time on specific elements of the
data science process and leaning on automated
technology to do the rest.

The evolution and advancement of technology is

the hallmark of life in the twenty-first century. The
applications we use on our computers, tablets,
and phones fundamentally change the way we
as humans engage with information, each other,
and the broader world. With every new addition
to the technological resources we enjoy, it’s easy
to feel like we yield to artificial intelligence as its
capabilities and influence grow. While there are
robust conversations about both the benefits
and drawbacks of technological progress, we see
massive benefits come from new technology as
we collect, manage, and make sense of data. In
this data-rich landscape, it’s easy to be in awe of
the computational power wielded by machines,
but it is equally important to honor human in-
telligence and how it uniquely contributes to
addressing problems. It behooves us first to
understand the scientific process as it applies to
solving business problems, then determine what
components of that process should confidently
be automated and which should stay rooted in
human application. The scope of that inquiry is
beyond this article, but we can pursue a similar
investigation by looking at what outcomes we
care about when embarking on a data science
Tessa Jones initiative.
Let’s consider, for a moment, what outcomes we cess allows us to produce high-value insights faster.
care about. Generally, they can be broken down With this approach, organizations can better deter-
into the following graphic, which also demonstrates mine where in the process their people should focus,
how the human to machine scale tips for each of and by contrast, where machines can contribute at
the key outcomes. This framework highlights when, a relatively low cost. Moreover, organizations can
how, and to what extent machines can best be lev- focus more on strategy and less on technical work,
eraged.
leading to more insightful, higher-impact business
questions. Technologies are not all created equally,
When evaluating this set of outcomes and the hu-
and selecting the right technology requires a data
man/machine components, it is clear that while tech-
scientist to consider the problem set, available data,
nology expedites and simplifies the execution of de-
and the computing power necessary to execute the
veloping models, there is something special about
job. While these aspects of a data science project
the human mind and its ability to understand com-
are highly variable from one organization to the
plexities that are difficult to quantify with machines
next, what remains constant is which components
alone. Perhaps the best example of this is technolo-
of the outcomes are impacted by leveraging ma-
gy’s inability to automate business acumen and dis-
chines and should rely on human input. No solution
cernment around business decisions: both of which
will balance the human input and machine automa-
are vital to successfully building and implementing
tion perfectly, but a deeper understanding of how
a data science strategy. Within the foreseeable fu-
and why each is important could greatly improve
ture, humans must incorporate their understanding
the chances of success for any data science project.
of business processes and data to make decisions
regarding what problems to solve, how to inte-
Calligo unlocks the power of your data
grate solutions into the business process, and what
We combine great minds in data science, priva-
data is necessary to develop solutions. Assessing
cy, security and engineering with leading machine
the statistical application and nuance of a solution
learning, data analytics and cloud platforms to sup-
to optimize its power is also an inherently human
port the operational, customer-centric and reve-
contribution to data science development. In short,
nue-generation aspirations of some of the world’s
technology is only as powerful as those that lever-
most ambitious and progressive organizations.
age it. Understanding the delicate balance between
the ingenuity of humans versus the computational
https://www.calligo.io
abilities of machines within the development pro-
13
 ME TAVERSE ,
SPACE TRAVEL
MULTITUDE POSSIBILITIES
By Ina Wanca, Vice President: Global Lead AI Solutions, Mastercard &
Aakanksha Jadhav, Director, Product Development
Ina Wanca
J
eff Bezos, the billionaire behind the Amazon.com
brand, and Richard Branson, the billionaire be-
hind Virgin Airlines, both recently blasted off on
separate projects to the edge of space. For years, the
idea of commercial space travel sounded like science
fiction. Now, it is inching ever closer to reality.
Bezos’s most recent venture notably included the
participation of 91-year-old actor William Shatner
of Star Trek fame. If casual space tourism is good
enough (and safe enough) for Captain James T. Kirk,
it stands to reason that it is good enough for the rest
of us.
Commercial space flight is expected to become a
$23 billion market as soon as 2030. This raises many
questions, including what will the situation be re-
garding off-planet commerce? There is still a lot to
figure out, from conversion issues to handling the ul-
timate cross-border transactions. Despite this, con-
sumers do not need to wait to reserve their tickets to
travel to space. Right now, they can experience zero
gravity and all its effects by way of the Metaverse.
The Metaverse and Commer-
cial Space Travel: Breaking
Things Down
Now, technologies like virtual reality and augmented
reality go beyond simulating space travel to provide
an impression of a potential future. They can allow
consumers to purchase rewards, trade goods among
themselves, and more. They can give someone the
visceral experience of what it might be like to land
on the moon or help them feel what it might be like
to visit faraway planets.
14
AND THE
The Metaverse was designed to be a vast network of
3D virtual worlds that focus on social connections.
It is similar to Facebook and Twitter but with an ex-
periential component. Many experts describe it as a
logical extension of the Internet—one that brings all
facets together into a single, universal virtual world
that allows people to live out their virtual lives the
same way they might their literal ones.
To accomplish this, a wide range of different hard-
ware and software-based solutions will be needed.
Chief among those are the aforementioned aug-
mented reality and virtual reality tools and mixed
reality hardware. Of course, virtual world IT will be
required to create these interactive environments.
There are currently no official standards or best
practices for implementing this software. Hardware
items will likely require significant operating systems
to power the types of digital expe-
riences that people will soon
come to expect. Addi-
tionally, the Metaverse
technologies are be-
ing enhanced with
AI-powered mod-
els that could store
data on physical
objects gathered
from digital inter-
actions. The data
is leveraged to rec-
ommend an action or
predict a situation. For
example, astronauts can use
data to improve their machine
repairs or simulate a journey to the Moon to gather
real-time travel feedback.
Consumer expectations beg the following question:
how will buyers’ behavior change once the Metaverse
is ready for prime time? In theory, once the mod-
el is widely adopted, it will first be used for things
like those described above, such as simulating space
travel and things of that nature. What happens once
brands begin to figure out how to integrate it into
their own storefronts? The Metaverse poses a rev-
olutionary opportunity for brands in terms of how
they’ll engage with consumers and how they struc-
ture themselves internally. Most organizations will
have a digital twin of themselves within a few years.
That twin will effectively sit in the Metaverse, and the
organization will be run from the Metaverse in many
ways.
Do a consumer’s expectations of who walks into a
physical retail location vary from a consumer expe-
riencing that store via the Metaverse? How does this
variance adjust best practices in customer service?
What can businesses learn from trends in the com-
mercial space sector that will allow them to attract
and retain more customers?
Space can command a massive global audience for
brands. Take the Red Bull stratosphere jump in 2012.
At the time, it was the most-watched live stream
event in history. The jump was streamed in 50 coun-
tries across 80 TV stations and 280 digital partners.
YouTube alone attracted 340 million live stream
views (8 million concurrent). Half of the worldwide
trending topics on Twitter were about the event (3
million tweets).
Red Bull invested $65 million to finance the stunt;
the global exposure was worth
multiple billions of dollars
(with some estimates as
high as $6 billion). And
though the strato-
sphere is technical-
ly below the Kar-
man Line, it serves
as a great model
for what’s possible
with the right cre-
ative minds. Felix
Baumgartner broke
the record for the highest
altitude skydive that day.
Further, it’s not hard to imagine a situation where
the Metaverse is used to onboard space travelers
remotely, so they can
experience what a
journey to the
stars might feel
like. In this
case, peo-
ple would no
longer need
to board a
rocket aircraft
for travel. Their
home may become
their orbit, and they may
feel as excited as they could in a physical
space location. In addition, space cardholders can
purchase rewards for exclusive space travel offers to
enhance their simulated space reality.
There have been criticisms of the very concept of the
Metaverse, and privacy concerns are chief among
them. This is caused by the same idea of bringing
together all aspects of the internet into a shared so-
cial experience and the enormous volume of person-
al information this will require. Facebook has been
criticized for its business plan, both for the ways in
which it uses targeted advertising and for spreading
false information online. Nobody can say whether
either of these two concerns will continue into the
Metaverse.
Regardless of what you think about them as busi-
nessmen, people like Bezos and Branson are paving
the way for what is possible in commercial space
travel. Right now, there are wealthy people on wait-
ing lists to secure their spots on upcoming flights.
More realistically, a company called Space Perspec-
tives plans to fly tourists (private citizens) to space in
2024. This company reimagines space travel. It offers
a six-hour journey to low orbit, and it has sold 5,000
tickets already. Average consumers don’t necessarily
have to wait that long, and they don’t need unlimited
resources. The Metaverse, which will be here before
you know it, can provide a similarly immersive ex-
perience thanks to augmented reality, virtual reality,
and more. When you think about just how far this
type of technology has come in the past five years
alone, it’s exciting to consider what the next five (and
beyond) have in store for us all.
COVER PAGE VISUAL SYNTH
A PARADIGM SH

HETIC DATA GENERATION:
HIFT FOR COMPUTER VISION

C
omputer Vision (CV) is a
branch of Artificial Intelli-
gence (AI) for which we can
observe an ever-increasing trend
of use cases in different industries.

Guglielmo Iozzia,
Associate Director – Data Science, ML/AI, Computer Vision,
MSD
You can identify 2012 as the boom year for
CV, thanks to the improvements since Neu-
ral Network algorithms (which were already
there for a while) started matching humans
in several visual tasks. This progress is due
to multiple factors that started approximate-
ly in the same year: a continuous improve-
ment and scale production costs reductions
of computational hardware, the advent of the
cloud, larger research investments both in
academic and industrial environments, open
sourcing of novel models, larger availability
of data sources.
Manufacturing has been the slowest in the
adoption of AI-based CV, but nowadays, you
can find many (in production or ready to go)
applications for diverse tasks, such as quality
inspection, safety, robotics, packaging, XR,
etc.
Unfortunately, now as these systems are de-
ployed to production, we are often going to
hit a brick wall for one or a combination of
the following issues:
• Unreliable labelled data: labelling typical-
ly is made by a pool of SMEs that cannot
have the same level of expertise in the
required knowledge domain, making as-
signed labels subjective.
• Little effort from academia to get good
data: most research in CV focused and
still focused mostly on algorithms.
• Lack of generalization: several CV algo-
rithms fail when applied to a different
domain from the original one they have
been trained for.
• Last but not least, lack of data (at all or
part of the data, you need to train a mod-
el to perform a given CV task).
The latter is the situation that you can often
face in some manufacturing use cases, such
as visual inspection or quality controls.
For the reasons listed above, a new paradigm
has been born and has already started to be
adopted by diverse organizations. The goal is
not to create better algorithms but increase
performance by changing the data itself by
having more control of the data sourcing
process. This can be achieved by balancing
or enhancing existing datasets through syn-
thetic data generation. The real goal here isn’t
adding more data at the same time to train-
ing datasets but adding more variety of data
(attention to quality rather than quantity
then) to make models more robust. Moving
from more complex to smarter then, instead
of building larger models and using more
computational power to solve problems, we
can be smart about how we source data from
which algorithms learn. Algorithms don’t
need more of the same data to learn; they
need a variety of everything.
Deep Generative Models are used in this new
paradigm. These models usually hit the head-
lines only when they have been used for ma-
licious purposes to generate Deep Fakes. In
reality, there are also several applications for
goods across diverse industries.
There is already a market for this: dozens of
startup companies with significant revenue
offering services to generate synthetic data
(images and videos in particular) exist. Un-
fortunately, the majority of these companies
focus on some general knowledge areas, such
as automotive/autonomous driving, satel-
lite or aerial imagery, and retail. At the same
time, there is very little or no coverage for do-
mains that require specific knowledge, such
as manufacturing or chemistry.
With reference to CV, a truly scalable way of
creating training data is through Virtual Re-
ality (VR) engines. In terms of fidelity, the
output has become indistinguishable from
the real world, and this approach gives full
scene control to the users, allowing them to
generate smart data to be used to better train
algorithms. This approach not only can over-
come the lack of required data but also reduc-
es the time-consuming and expensive process
of manual data labelling.
But the reality is much more than what the hu-
man eye can see and refer to use cases under-
standable by humans with dedicated knowl-
edge and expertise. The algorithms that are
built and trained with data that can be gen-
erated through VR-based engines are most-
ly focused on what a human can understand
and label. In the future, we would probably
be in a condition to build algorithms for sen-
sors that measure beyond human perception
and/or niche domains, but at present, these
tasks require a programmatic effort. There
are already organizations pioneering in this
space for these challenging use cases. Some
examples have been shared during some ma-
jor ML/AI conferences, with examples from
the energy, semiconductors, chemistry, and
pharma manufacturing sectors. Because of
the lack of dedicated third-party services, if
an organization wants to pursue a synthetic
data generation strategy by itself, it has to:
• Think out of the box.
• Have a clear idea of the business value to
achieve.
• Once a value assessment has been com-
pleted, move fast in order to fail fast to get
the answers needed and succeed faster.
• Be agile.
• Don’t constantly reinvent the wheel: give
existing papers and Open Source models/
tools a chance.
• Reduce technical debt: doing things in
cloud infrastructure and using a dedicat-
ed ML/AI platform helps keep the focus
only on the specific business problem.
• Most of all: Invest in people and attract
and retain talents:
• Domain experts, as they have
the knowledge.
• Data Scientists and ML Engi-
neers, as they can make ideas
reality.
Definitely, this is a challenging step, but I
have good reasons to believe that the time for
wide adoption of visual synthetic data is now.
 DATA IS DISRUPTING
PRIVATE CREDIT,
DRIVING THE ASSET
CLASS DIGITAL
Joshua Masia
By Joshua Masia, Chief Product Officer, Finitive
O
ver the past few years, institutional in-
vestors have increased their allocations
to private credit lending. A desire for
higher returns in a period of low-interest rates is
the key driver. According to PitchBook, a research
and technology firm focusing on private capital
markets, a record high of $191.2 billion flowed
into this asset class in 2021. Another market data
provider, Prequin, reports that this market has
seen consistent and robust growth, averaging
13.5% annually in recent years. Preqin forecasts
that private credit will accelerate to a compound
annual growth rate of 17.4% between 2022 and
2026, propelling it to become the second-largest
private capital asset class in 2023.
Even as interest rates rise, this trend is set to con-
tinue. Unlike investing in the fixed-rate public
bond markets, private credit allows investors to
gain access to variable-rate, low correlation, low
volatility and shorter-duration investments. This
attribution mitigates a portfolio’s overall risk pro-
file.
The massive fiscal and monetary stimulus inject-
ed into the system over the past few years means
private credit investors have the capital to lend.
20
Finding the right borrowers can be a time-con-
suming, manual and error-prone process. It is
highly competitive and requires extensive con-
tacts and costly research. After all that effort, in-
stitutions still risk failing their investment param-
eters, remit and due diligence requirements.
The pandemic as a catalyst
When in-person networking, conferences,
on-site visits, deal-making and due dili-
gence went virtual two years ago, it was hard
to conceive how deals could move forward.
It quickly became clear that replacing travel
and meetings with virtual deal sourcing ac-
celerated closings. This shift allows lenders
and borrowers to execute transactions from
anywhere, at any time. Digital marketplaces
stepped up to empower investors to quick-
ly source deals online, further accelerating
a standard and scalable approach to due dil-
igence, pricing, structuring and executing
transactions. With all this efficiency and new-
found time, the number of deals began to rise.
While public investment pricing and re-
search have long been accessible online, the
$100 trillion private credit space has always
been opaque. However, data-driven platforms
and artificial intelligence are closing the in-
formation and efficiency gap between public
and private investing. With new online mar-
ketplaces, transactions are getting sourced, put
through due diligence, structured and closed
quicker and more efficiently than before.
How data connects lenders and
borrowers
What we’ve seen is a rapid and momentous shift
from a human-centric business to a data-driven
digital business that seamlessly matches lend-
ers and borrowers. Marketplaces can connect
lenders with borrowers by relying on data and
algorithms to find appropriate deals. Investors
can set extensive parameters such as investment
focus, desired yield and duration. Borrowers in-
put their desired cost of capital and critical fi-
nancial data for lenders to review. With all this
data in one place, lenders and borrowers can
understand each other’s motivations faster and
forge more meaningful partnerships based on
shared goals.
In the world of data, we can break it down into
three types: referential, also known as static
data that doesn’t change often; transactional,
which is data that moves quickly and evolves
over time; and state machines, which gives data
depth by presenting it as a lifecycle. These states
can be used to build workflows that are easy to
interpret and drive universal agreement of pro-
cess. As a result, data-enabled platforms can
remove inefficiencies and standardize deal pro-
cesses. Although basic and obvious in appear-
ance, these marketplaces have recently looked
to identify patterns in deals and drive market
efficiencies.
With new algorithms, we can centralize the
process of private lending, making it look more
like investing in equities. Today, asset managers
can process all information in minutes or even
seconds and complete transactions in a fraction
of the time it once took.
Algorithms are transforming how we extract
data. Instead of making borrowers log on and
fill out forms, we can identify and process data
from structured, semi-structured and unstruc-
tured documents—PDFs, Excel spreadsheets,
videos—places where valuable data has tradi-
tionally been lost in a sea of information. Not
only does this simplify the process, but it also
provides further automated validation by mov-
ing from a few dozen data points to thousands
or even millions just by uploading a few docu-
ments. This also challenges the decades of “data
rooms” that have entrenched large portions of
the alternative investment space. Delivering
documents to people in a legacy file system
brings no value. Taking that data and proactive-
ly delivering insights in a uniform and repeat-
able manner saves days, weeks and, sometimes,
months of time.
In the private credit market, new technology is
also effectively freeing up borrowers who previ-
ously had to devote countless hours seeking to
find and share information with investors. These
technologies enable them to spend their time
doing the infinitely more valuable work of run-
ning their businesses. Ultimately, new technol-
ogies facilitate better data management without
forcing companies to add new employees. That’s
where all businesses want to be—adding reve-
nue without headcount. As investor appetite for
private credit grows and digital solutions ma-
ture, we can expect to see greater transparency,
speed and deal flow.
21
 FINANCIAL RISK MA
APPLICATION ON AWS U
2012 SP3(HIGH PERFORM
( 2016-2
T
he Financial Risk management
application is an income fore-
casting, Asset-Liability Manage-
ment & Market Risk Analysis
application which enables cli-
ents to model the assets, liabilities, and off-
balance-sheet instruments. It measures the
Risk of a Balance Sheet under Any Econom-
ic Scenario. It creates reports that effectively
and concisely deliver the management needs
to make profitable financial decisions.
In the financial organization, I have worked
for, the FRM applications’ quarterly/annual
balance sheet jobs have been running over
200 on-prem data center parallel servers, and
it took approximately a month to complete
the jobs. It is due to a lot of financial calcu-
lations and it uses the Monte Carlo method.
The management is decided to optimize the
balance sheet job execution and save the ana-
lyst time by moving to the cloud to utilize the
features like scalability, reduction in costs,
Improved performance, secure and speedy
disaster recovery, greener and time-saving
on maintenance. We have evaluated various
cloud providers and decided to go with AWS
cloud and Microsoft HPC (high performance
computing) as it meets our requirement.
Microsoft High Performance Computing
(HPC) allows FRM Users to solve complex,
compute-intensive problems. FRM applica-
tions require high network performance, fast
storage, large amounts of memory and very
high compute capabilities or all of these. AWS
enables you to increase the speed of FRM
runs and reduce time-to-results by running
HPC in the cloud and scaling to more signifi-
cant numbers of parallel tasks. AWS helps re-
duce costs by providing CPU servers on-de-
mand (Spot Instances), optimized for specific
applications, and without the need for large
capital investments. We automated provi-
sioning EC2 HPC Spot instances clusters on
AWS, attach and detach DB’s, compute nodes
for patching and restore databases from AWS
S3 storage using PowerShell Scripting.
ANAGEMENT (FRM)
USING MICROSOFT HPC
MANCE COMPUTING)
2019) By Kishore Kesanapally
VP of Data Analytics/Data Science/Business
Wells Fargo

The Financial Risk Management

application (FRM) is deployed on
AWS using cloud formation tem-
plates with auto scaling of hun-
dreds of computing cores using
Microsoft HPC (high perfor-
mance clustering). HPC uses
parallel computing features
on Windows HPC Serv-
er 2012. The term HPC
(High Performance
Computing) is virtu-
ally synonymous with
supercomputers and
parallel computing.
After implementing
this project, the bal-
ance sheet job took
only 24 hours to com-
plete. By moving to the
cloud, the ROI (Return
on investment) of the proj-
ect (over the next five years)
is estimated to be $100M. It
includes labor costs, data center
costs and server maintenance.
 ENABLING A SEAMLESS
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE:
THE 4 PILLARS OF
EXPERIENTIAL EXCELLENCE
By Waseem Kawaf
Vice President, Global Digital Experience
Waseem Kawaf STANLEY Security
I
n the last two years, there’s been an acceler-
ation of digital experience unlike any seen
in modern history. Customers today expect
convenient, simple, and on-demand experienc-
es, and businesses must transform to accommo-
date these new demands.
With the bulk of the customer interactions mov-
ing to digital channels as opposed to in-person
events or outreach, companies have been forced
to pivot their customer experience strategy and
execution. Customers expect to be able to reach
out to brands via any channel, at any time, and
on their terms. The challenge for many compa-
nies is that traditionally the customer experience
has been fragmented and siloed across different
teams working on different channels.
The answer is a structured approach to experi-
ence in the digital space that brings together all
touchpoints and channels, informed by users’
expressed and implied preferences. While a so-
phisticated tech stack is an enabler of great ex-
periences, it is vital that the customer – not the
technology, alone – guide how you approach the
experience.
The Four Pillars of Customer Experience, as de-
scribed below, is the framework that STANLEY
Security has applied to stay grounded in the cus-
tomers’ needs. It has proven successful for us
and has application to virtually any organization
24
with a large and growing user base.
Pillar 1: User Experience & User-Driven
Design
One of the most common mistakes compa-
nies make is to base experiential decisions on
assumptions, not data. Instead, organizations
should evaluate their user experience and inter-
face based on what the data uncovers.
The design industry has a well-established ap-
proach to analyzing user experience that can be
applied to every touchpoint across the custom-
er lifecycle. Start by understanding the friction
points and silos. For example, we noticed that
the bulk of the conversations on our website
were related to support, billing, and service. We
shared that insight with key stakeholders, then
optimized touchpoints across channels to relieve
this pain point. Taking a deep look allows you to
truly experience your brand from the customer’s
perspective.
Also, a consistent design language gives ex-
pression to your brand’s experience across
the digital landscape, from your website to
apps and interfaces. As with user experience,
it’s essential to take a deeper look at the data
behind your brand’s design to continuously
meet customers’ expectations and preferences.
For example, each of our design components is
preference-tested with users on an ongoing ba-
sis, because needs and wants change constantly,
and customers expect companies to keep up. In
this way, we make user-driven decisions backed
by data.
Pillar 2: Personalization via Artificial
Intelligence & Machine Learning
Businesses now have easy access to incredibly
powerful artificial intelligence (AI) and machine
learning (ML) tools, which create opportunities
for better experiences almost everywhere you
look. Even “legacy” experiential platforms such
as telephony systems are, in fact, truly digital
channels.
Through natural language processing of custom-
er calls and website chats, a business can map
intents and teach virtual agents to understand
these and respond accurately and consistently,
24/7, across phone, chat, social, and SMS chan-
nels.
In our initial use cases with this technology, we
have seen a more than 50% reduction of custom-
er hold time and a nearly 100% successful inter-
pretation of intent and customer need. These
virtual agents allow you to build a consistent and
user-driven experience that is always evolving
and optimizing to match the changing needs of
customers.
Pillar 3: Marketing Automation
The next pillar is a global marketing automa-
tion engine that brings together all the user data
from relevant customer experience platforms to
understand and respond to the varying needs of
customers and prospects throughout the buying
journey.
Marketing automation enables you to reach the
right contact with the right message and, just as
importantly, feed this data into your customer
relationship management (CRM) platform. It
allows you to measure engagement across in-
bound leads and monitor experience via chat,
billing, and service channels to ensure that sup-
port and other needs are being addressed in a
timely manner.
We have been able to create unique micro mo-
ments of delight with marketing automation as
we build a one-to-one nurture flow and messag-
ing and move beyond bulk sends of email to un-
differentiated groups of prospects or customers.
Pillar 4: Continual Insights & Struc-
tured Data
Finally, a structured data approach on all your
channels will help drive a unified customer ex-
perience. You can leverage open APIs and apply
consistent tagging to data elements to central-
ize data from key customer experience channels
into a real-time data hub – in our case, it now
includes more than 300 million lines.
You can see both macro trends – like what your
target users are searching for – and micro mo-
ments that illuminated the customer journey.
Best of all, the data hub democratizes access to
insights across your organization for continu-
ous improvement of customer experience. An-
alyzing and applying these insights ensures you
never rest on your laurels and can clearly under-
stand areas for improvement in the short, medi-
um, and long term.
Creating an Always-On Experience that
is Frictionless, Simple, and Connected
Every company needs customer experiences that
are truly exciting and delighting. Top brands un-
derstand customer experience as a dynamic and
living force that needs to be nurtured and con-
sistently developed.
A fully leveraged customer experience creates
a powerful differentiator. Because it’s not just a
question of technology: it’s the culture and dis-
cipline throughout the organization that ensures
every customer interaction is thought through
and optimized with the user at the heart.
25
 LESSONS IN
MULTI-CLOUD
SECURITY
By Dave Row, VP of Security Engineering, BillGO
So, you think you’re a One-Cloud
Organization?
M
onitoring Cloud Security can be daunting.
Each Cloud Service Provider (eg. AWS,
Azure, and GCP) offers native tools for
managing identity, securing services and data, moni-
toring security controls, and reporting on vulnerabil-
ities. These tools are typically tightly integrated with
the respective CSP’s platform. I’ll leave third-party
SaaS and PaaS security to another day.
In a single-cloud environment, it is possible to de-
velop a Security Program using native tooling. Ba-
sic capabilities are typically available at minor or no
additional cost. Even SIEM functionality is typically
offered. The downside is being locked into the Pro-
vider’s GUI, API, and specific approach to address-
ing security challenges.
However, many organizations quickly find them-
selves in a multi-cloud scenario, possibly through
acquisition or from a senior leader that decided to
run out to another Provider, to implement their fa-
vorite application from lives past. What happens to
your Security Program then? How quickly will you
be able to upskill your staff to get your arms around
the new environment? Will this week’s compliance
report still run and report across the entire space?
What about updating all those documented process-
es? Conversely, it could be as easy as granting your
Cloud Security platform access to the new environ-
ment and possibly deploying a new agent. For the
Security folks, the latter scenario seamlessly extends
familiar monitoring, reporting, investigation, and
vulnerability management tooling and processes.
This quickly instills confidence in coverage and se-
curity posture, even when you need to put out a few
dumpster fires in the new environment.
26
Logging
Developing a logging architecture becomes increas-
ingly important when you begin to accumulate mul-
tiple accounts/subscriptions for a single Cloud Pro-
vider. This becomes non-negotiable when multiple
clouds are in play. This is vital for ensuring that all
environments are covered, logging levels are suffi-
cient and appropriate, and costs are controlled. A
Logging Standard can be a great tool to document
what types of resources are expected to log and what
event types should be logged, at what level, to where,
and retained for how long. If you think of this as an
upside-down funnel, you have resources at the bot-
tom that generate events.
Your Logging Standard should dictate what type of
security, health, application, and other operational
events should be generated. Those logs could then
be viewed with cloud-native tools, collected for anal-
ysis elsewhere by scripts, made available to Cloud Se-
curity platforms (eg. Lacework or PrismaCloud) for
analysis, and/or sent to a SIEM for correlation and/or
alerting your SOC partner. The key is full situational
awareness and the frugality to only send events and
alerts to systems and people that can analyze and act
upon them. Otherwise, you’re wasting money on log
storage and likely over-provisioning the correspond-
ing analysis platform.
SIEMs need to fill a different role
Speaking of SIEMs, their traditional role has been to
sit on top of log data, to alert on specific events, or
to produce new alerts based upon the correlation of
multiple log events. Historically, this required lots
of care and feeding by very technical Security ex-
SIEM to have access to all log data, to avoid miss-
ing certain attacks. This can be incredibly expensive.
Fast-forward to the present and we have lots of great
analysis happening natively and great Cloud Security
platforms that can run machine-learning algorithms
to detect behavioral abnormalities that native tools,
SIEMs, and your teams’ eyeballs would likely miss.
On the balance, it’s OK to let your native tooling and/
or Cloud Security platform do much of this correla-
tion, only then forwarding alerts of interest to the
SIEM. In short, the SIEM is no longer the source
of all insight into your log data. This is also a more
cost-effective option than logging the same data in
multiple places.
Compliance
One terrific benefit of a multi-cloud security plat-
form is the ability to easily demonstrate compliance
with various standards (eg. CIS, ISO 27001, NIST,
PCI, and SOC 2), as well as vulnerability manage-
ment. Holistic Cloud Security platforms help to do
this consistently across multiple environments.
One special note on traditional “vulnerability scan-
ners:” There was a time when we needed to scan our
resources across the network, in order to detect vul-
nerabilities. This had lots of limitations, costs, and
overhead. For example, network segmentation often
required multiple scanners to be purchased and de-
ployed, external views of assets did not reveal all vul-
nerabilities, and some unlucky person got the priv-
ilege of ensuring that all assets were being scanned
at the right interval with the right scanner and the
right scanner profile. This intense fun leads to cre-
dentialled scans and then to agent-based scans (i.e.
the best position to detect vulnerabilities is directly
on the host). With hosts in the cloud, there’s the fan-
tastic native capability to detect OS-level vulnerabil-
ities, but you still want to manage those with a single
pane of glass. For example, Security must uniformly
drive these vulnerabilities – including recommended
remediation steps – and security policy misconfigu-
rations back to the resource owners for remediation.
Another note on “Endpoint Security:” The right
Cloud Security platform can do a decent job here,
typically for OS-level vulns, but there are Endpoint
Security solutions that are poised to dominate this
space in the cloud, offering deeper insights into vul-
nerabilities, including the potential to be exploited.
Solutions in this space include Crowdstrike, Cybere-
ason, SentinelOne, and Tanium. The best solutions
combine real-world threat intel (eg. attacks observed
in the wild and difficulty to exploit) to inform which
patches or other remediation is needed first.
Real-world investigations
When you have an alert to investigate, you need it to
be trustworthy. One particular area to watch is how
solutions deal with hosts being re-deployed with the
same IP address, but with an entirely different role. If
you tend to recycle IP addresses, do yourself a favor
and really test the ability of solutions to know which
host was running which service at a given time vs.
munging that all together. This is critical. In the con-
tainer world, services move fluidly between clusters.
IP addresses mean virtually nothing. Also, be sure
to understand how a solution differentiates between
when something was detected and whether it has
been remediated. This requires understanding when
reports are generated and how timely the threat or
vulnerability info is; It’s no fun to encourage some-
one to patch when the vuln was remediated weeks
ago.
Automation is Key
If you want to interrupt the attacker’s OODA Loop,
you must have automated responses to a variety of
alerts. This requires 1) high-confidence alerts and 2)
runbooks to guide the response process. SOAR plat-
forms have fantastic potential, but if you can’t man-
ually respond, you’ll never be able to automatically
respond. In the meantime, the time spent doing alert
enrichment and analysis will only benefit the attack-
er.
In Closing We’ve touched upon a wide variety of
considerations in this article. The most import-
ant thing to note is that you need to think through
prevention, detection, and response so that it’s as
all-encompassing, consistent across multiple Cloud
Providers, and as efficient and automated as possible.
Pulling together cloud-native, multi-cloud, and In-
cident Response capabilities as tightly as possible is
key. Demonstrating compliance in one pane of glass
is priceless. Now, get crackin’!
 EFFICIENT ESG
DATA GOUVERNANCE
By Maha Lebbos,
Vice President - Digital Transformation and Information Systems,
Fondaction
How does effective ESG data gover-
nance improve sustainability plans?
W
hen thinking ESG, the mind probably
immediately turns to disclosure, report-
ing and regulation. And it's no wonder:
frameworks and regulations such as GRI, SASB and
EU Taxonomy are heavy burdens to bear. BUT, ESG
reporting can be much more than publication. ESG
reports, and the processes put in place to complete
them can do much more for businesses than setting
up for regulatory success. The question we need to
ask ourselves is: Are we using ESG data to its full po-
tential? For most of us, the answer is probably no.
Yes, proper ESG reporting is key to meeting new reg-
ulatory requirements, influencing ESG credit ratings,
and improving reputation with sustainability-mind-
ed investors. But that's only half the battle. The other
half is the use of ESG performance data to improve
sustainability planning and impact, and the correla-
tion between ESG efforts and a company's financial
performance. And most companies are missing out
on this critical use case of ESG performance data.
While many companies are preparing to meet ESG
requirements, most of them have missed the incredi-
ble opportunity to use ESG data as an essential plan-
ning tool for long-term sustainable growth.
So how can one use ESG data, beyond reporting, to
improve sustainability initiatives?
Set up the proper ESG data governance
into an integrated reporting framework
Data governance is not about bureaucracy; it is a
structured process that allows the right information
to reach the right people at the right time. However,
when looking at a data-centric initiative, the focus is
key. Proper ESG data governance entails (1) general
requirements such as definitions and terminology,
data hierarchy, metrics and targets, fair presenta-
tion of general features and illustrative guidance. It
should focus on providing outputs such as (2) tran-
sition plans and carbon offsetting, climate resilience
and scenario analysis, financial impacts and antici-
pated effect, risk management and finally, cross-in-
dustry and industry-based metrics.
Use ESG data to enrich
budgets and cost analysis
When ESG data is integrated into a converged re-
porting framework, as part of an extended planning
and analysis strategy, businesses can see how ESG
data interacts and affects financial and operational
information to produce budgets, reports on devia-
tions and forecasts.
Let’s take a fashion industry example where an or-
ganization wants to use recycled materials as part of
a company-wide anti-waste initiative. The decisions
made to achieve this goal will have significant reper-
cussions on the entire production chain. The orga-
nization has to adapt the production plants, which
would have a financial impact, an impact on the sup-
ply chain, and delivery.
The ability to see ESG data in context with finan-
cial and other planning data is key to making ESG
initiatives sustainable – and, dare I say it, profitable.
Adding ESG data to the planning processes enables
a workforce plan, capacity, sales, and inventory anal-
ysis. It simulates scenarios to determine the ESG
course of action to produce the best results in sus-
tainability and profitability.
Using ESG Data to Mitigate Risk
Talking about ESG is talking about risk. Planet
risk, human well-being risk, ethical risk, credit risk.
Risk and ESG are intrinsically linked. There are so
many ways to shoot yourself in the foot with inef-
fective ESG practices, but there are just as many
opportunities to use ESG data to combat risk.
ESG needs to be integrated into a broader risk man-
agement framework to mitigate risk. Data and gov-
ernance controls, transparency in communications,
predictive planning, foresight when it comes to pre-
paring for threats and changing regulations – ESG
risk should be taken as seriously as liquidity risk.
Use ESG data to transform your
business model and support
sustainable growth
Where seeing banknotes flying when thinking about
sustainable business models, we now see revenue
streams. At a time when climate change poses a cat-
astrophic threat to humanity, the global call to fight
climate change presents an extraordinary opportuni-
ty for organizations to attract investors and tap into
new markets - while doing good for the Earth and its
inhabitants.
ESG data can shed light on critical factors. For ex-
ample, how switching to renewable energy sources
would impact costs or how natural resources would
affect sales. Organizations can use this information
to transform their operations and business model
into one that promotes and achieves the Sustainable
Development Goals.
This may mean identifying business areas ripe for
sustainable change in relevant social aspects for some
organizations. For other organizations, ESG data can
point to new opportunities. ESG data can help iden-
tify areas of business that are ripe for sustainability
investment and determine whether customers are
likely to buy into sustainable innovations. More so,
companies can use ESG data to engage in mergers,
acquisitions, or investments in sustainable compa-
nies to strengthen their ESG efforts and make their
portfolio more sustainable as part of overall gover-
nance.
All these examples have one thing in common:
the use of ESG data to identify areas of sustainable
growth through analytics and predictive planning.
Findings
The solution utilized to manage ESG data should tick
all the compliance boxes. But don't forget: Sustain-
ability isn't just about running a single clothing line
that uses recycled plastics, or an annual emissions
reduction target. It's about becoming a sustainable
business.
The public sentiment is that companies that do not
deliver ESG results now and soon are not a good in-
vestment. They are not durable; that is, they will not
stand the test of time. Therefore, ESG data should not
be limited to publication in sustainability reports. By
using ESG data to develop plans, forecasts, risk miti-
gation measures and overall strategy, companies can
serve themselves while serving others, improving the
planet and the way business is conducted.
With this in mind, I firmly believe in harnessing the
full potential of ESG data, which means extending
the use of this information to enrich decision-mak-
ing, long-term plans and reputation through a solu-
tion that facilitates xP&A and reporting and publica-
tion of figures.
29