Lingua Custodia launches the very first machine translation engine specialised in ESG

PRESS RELEASE

Paris, June 9th, 2021

Lingua Custodia, the Fintech Company specialist in the application of artificial intelligence to financial translations, today announced the launch of the first machine translation engine specialised in ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) criteria. It was designed and developed by Lingua Custodia’s Research & Development team (the Lab), made up of PhDs in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Experts in “machine learning”, their new tool will enable financial institutions and companies to automatically translate all the reference documents on sustainable and responsible finance.

Powered by SRI (Socially Responsible Investment) and ESG linguistic data from multiple information sources, this first ESG engine allows 100% machine translation of ESG documentation. It is currently available in the following languages: French to English and English to French on Verto, Lingua Custodia’s web platform that consolidates all their engines specialised in finance.

At the beginning of 2021, Lingua Custodia’s Research & Development team had already developed a prototype allowing the comparison of two financial documents in terms of economic, environmental, and social vocabulary according to the GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) Standards. This prototype makes it possible to quantify the occurrences of vocabulary associated with these three axes for documents written in English and obtain a graph, for comparison.

“Financial institutions today produce many SRI and ESG related documents and their translation needs are growing, explains Olivier Debeugny, CEO of Lingua Custodia. The subject is particularly complex because we must work on a vast lexical field. The launch of this first machine translation engine, highly specialised in ESG, successfully meets this challenge and is, therefore, a real asset for financial players, particularly in the context of the entry into force of the SFDR (Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation), which imposes new rules on transparency. Our clients thus have access to an engine capable of processing ESG content in the most relevant way possible.“

Beyond the expressions specific to the world of ESG, Lingua Custodia’s teams of Data Scientists can collect and process a large volume of data and bilingual content, including content of a very general nature (global warming, biodiversity, sustainable development, etc.) which is now analysed from a financial perspective. They have therefore concentrated their efforts on collecting, cleaning, and processing data to be able to generate millions of sentences to produce coherent and relevant content. Lingua Custodia has diversified its sources of information and linguistic data: sustainability and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) reports from companies, SRI policies from asset management companies, and information documents from SRI funds to capture the language used in this field.

Like all the machine translation engines offered by Lingua Custodia, this new ESG engine can be accessed directly on the company’s SaaS* platform using a login and password. It can also be integrated via API to reporting platforms or financial players’ systems. It is available only in French and English for the moment, and this engine may be updated to include other languages in the future.

* Software as a service

About Lingua Custodia

Lingua Custodia – the guardian of the language in Latin – is the only Fintech Company expert in “Machine Learning” applied to financial linguistics. With offices in France and Luxembourg, it offers over a hundred specialised translation engines available in nine languages (German, English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, and Portuguese). Its clients include the largest French and international institutions. The company is labelled by Finance Innovation since 2014 and is a founding member of France Fintech since 2015. In 2018, it joined the LHoFT (Luxembourg House of Financial Technology) and the Village by CA. In 2019, it became a member of Techquartier (Frankfurt). Since 2020, it has also been part of the Réseau des Entreprises de Défense (RED) of the French Ministry of Defence.