Innovation in Finance & the UN SDGs Day – Climate Finance Week

In association with the UN-convened Green Digital Finance Alliance, SIF Ireland and the Sustainable Finance Skillnet.

The European Green Deal and the digital transformation agenda are defined as pathways to a COVID-19 recovery aligned with a climate-neutral future.

Accelerating the twin green and digital transformation objectives also applies to finance. Until recently, green finance and fintech were two separate tracks. This is starting to change both driven by bottom-up fintech innovations for instance introducing digital green challenger banks, but also by asset managers and asset owners looking to digital technologies to solve barriers associated with green finance.

With the introduction of the EU taxonomy on sustainable finance, the market is set to experience an increasing degree of standardization of green financial products and services, which will further accelerate the potential to adopt AI supervised green finance processes and products such as automated labelling of assets. The notion of green digital finance captures this development where green and digital start to converge in financial instruments powered by technologies such as AI, IoT, DLT, and machine learning to better align capital flows with the objectives of the Paris agreement.

This session will outline the state of the green digital finance market in Europe and beyond offering examples both from the capital market and retail level. It will also discuss strategies available to states as well as to asset managers and asset owners to further accelerate their own pathway defined by the twin objectives of green finance and digitization.