OneConnect and SGX partner to facilitate ESG disclosures listed on SGX

By Leandra Monteiro

OneConnect a technology-as-a-service platform provider and an associate of Ping An Insurance Company of China, Ltd., today announced that it had entered a Memorandum of Understanding  with Singapore Exchange to join forces and build an environmental, social and governance platform to facilitate and simplify the ESG disclosure processes of companies listed on SGX.

This collaboration is to develop a sustainable ecosystem by raising the quality of ESG disclosures and promoting the application and integration of ESG factors across capital market stakeholders in the long term.

The platform will help make sustainability disclosures for possible benchmarking more transparent for those companies listed on the SGX. OneConnect is also looking at helping companies overcome common challenges faced by investors when dealing with ESG information. These challenges mostly include lack of comparability, changing investors’ demand and the evolving business landscape and regulations.

OneConnect has partnered with Ping An to deliver ESG solutions for companies outside of China. Ping An has leveraged its finance and technology expertise to develop the Ping An AI-ESG Platform to monitor its internal ESG performance. Using various artificial intelligence tools Ping An AI-ESG Platform captures and computes the five-year ESG scores of all Chinese A-share companies for its benchmarking and investment-decision making.

Ms Jessica Tan, Co-CEO of Ping An Group, said, “As a champion of ESG, Ping An believes in ‘tech for social good’ where technologies can aptly enable every company to become a responsible corporate citizen. With the development of Ping An’s own artificial intelligence-driven ESG framework in China – we see the synergy in sharing and integrating our expertise in ESG into a platform that can be adopted by other companies, thereby bolstering the ESG culture across Asia Pacific.”

Ms Tan Bin Ru, CEO (SEA), OneConnect Financial Technology, shared, “With ESG taking centre-stage in the global scene, companies are increasingly subject to a set of non-financial reporting of ESG factors to meet investors’ demands and regulatory requirements. This is an opportune time and an esteemed privilege for OneConnect to join hands to develop the ESG platform with SGX. This is a remarkable moment for us to be able to tap on our expertise and work alongside SGX in creating and implementing a robust platform for SGX-listed companies to better their journey on ESG reporting and strengthen their sustainability risk management.”

Mr Michael Syn, Senior Managing Director and Head of Equities, SGX, said, “Investors globally are placing increasing importance on sustainability considerations, leading to significant growth in capital allocated to ESG strategies. As a result, both investors and issuers desire ESG data to be more transparent, standardised and accessible. The data and workflow platform will help SGX-listed companies report with more effective alignment to major disclosure standards. The focus is on a core set of indicators that are quantitative in nature and normalised for comparability. This complements issuers’ materiality-based reporting that are highly specific to each listed company’s business context. For investors, the benefit is more seamless integration of this core set of indicators into their investment strategies and capital allocation across portfolios, lowering the information friction they currently face.”