Collaborating with the Curious
Throughout March, analytics leader SAS brought together hundreds of curious minds for the virtual Hackathon. The competition challenged data scientists, technology enthusiasts and business visionaries in a host of industries to apply technology to solve real-world business and humanitarian problems.
In May, SAS announced regional winners for the Americas; Asia Pacific; and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA); as well as winners in the specific industry and technology sub-categories. The winners were chosen by more than 50 expert judges from innovative giants like Google and HP.
Representing SAS’ partner ecosystem, KPMG Austria was named the regional winner in EMEA for their work with environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria to help investors find companies with values that match their own. The team created a new data analysis feature for its ESG tool CLIMAID that uses SAS machine learning and natural language processing to analyze web data, score firms across 39 categories and build a model to predict ESG scores for any portfolio.
Fabius Leinhart, ESG-Consultant at KPMG, gave us insight about their award-winning solution and decision to join the first global hackathon at SAS.
What prompted you to join the SAS Global Hackathon?
As a strategic partner we are always keen to participate in the initiatives of SAS. The SAS Global Hackathon was a great possibility to test and prove the abilities of our new team that is especially familiar with the topics technology solutions, credit risk and ESG risk. We also wanted to enhance our knowledge of SAS IT infrastructure.
How familiar was your team with SAS Viya to begin with?
We have had basic knowledge of SAS Viya but have never really used it before.
Please explain your winning use case.
Our winning use case was to create ESG risk scores between 0 (minimum risk) and 1 (maximum risk) for all companies with at least an ISIN or a company website. We use web-scraping, natural language processing and machine learning to gather and assess information on the websites of the companies.
Was there anything surprising that you learned?
We were honestly surprised how well up-to-date technology can be used to derive ESG risk scores for companies based on their disclosures. We back-tested our results with ESG risk scores that are publicly available and found that we were able to find very similar scores with a fully automated assessment algorithm. This will save a lot of time and money for our clients.
SAS’ first ever global Hackathon featured participants from more than 30 countries, with experience ranging from novice to expert to uncover bold new insights and create life-changing solutions using SAS’ industry-leading analytics. They included SAS customers, partners and startups, as well as dozens of students from universities.
SAS and KPMG have a long-term partnership in several global markets and have been very successful in bringing their joint capabilities to the market in the Nordics.
KPMG brings practical experience and deep industry knowledge to the advisory role and has taken a proactive role in advising shared clients on how to reap the full benefits of their investment in SAS software, not least as related to related to Data Management, Risk Management, and Fraud.
To learn more about each winning team and view short videos of their projects, visit the SAS Hackathon page and search by team name.
