SINGAPORE, March 16, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading Singapore-headquartered Environmental, Social, and Governance ('ESG') FinTech firm, Hashstacs Pte Ltd ('STACS') today announces the launch of its full suite of ESG solutions for banks, stock exchanges, asset managers, corporates, and small and medium-sized enterprises ('SMEs'), as part of its refreshed vision as "The Nexus of ESG Finance". The full suite of ESG solutions - ESGpedia, Vetta smart contract platform, and ESG Playbooks - aims to enable effective Sustainable Finance.
This follows STACS's prominent partnership announcement with the Monetary Authority of Singapore's ('MAS') Project Greenprint last November. STACS's flagship blockchain-powered registry, ESGpedia, will serve as the Greenprint ESG Registry. ESGpedia is an industry-wide library that provides financial institutions, corporates, and regulatory authorities a single point of access to quality ESG certifications and data of various industry sectors, and enhances the mobilisation of ESG capital.
Today, one of the main challenges faced by financial institutions and corporates alike in extending or achieving effective sustainable finance is the lack of ongoing access to certifications and verified forward-looking ESG data. Existing pools of ESG data are fragmented and mostly in non-digital systems across different sectors, causing difficulty to make informed ESG investment decisions. Data available tends to be historical since disclosure by corporates usually occurs only once every year or two. This results in fears of greenwashing amongst financial institutions as there is no oversight of the corporate's progress, causing hesitancy in mobilisation of capital for sustainability. A vicious cycle of a lack of ESG financing is thus created. In 2021, there was an estimated US$3.1 trillion funding gap towards financing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
On top of that, many smaller corporates are excluded from sustainability services simply because industry certification is expensive and slow to attain due to highly manual processes and the lack of use of technology.
STACS aims to enable financial institutions and companies of all sizes to overcome the above challenges by providing ESGpedia as a nexus connecting sustainability and the financial industry. First of its type globally, STACS ESGpedia aggregates all ESG efforts, filling the gap in ESG Finance and Data where there is no other such platform today for both financial institutions and corporates alike.
ESGpedia is one of the two STACS's flagship platforms. STACS Vetta platform, has been deployed live with global leading financial institutions since June 2020. Vetta allows for effective and automated ongoing monitoring and lifecycle management via smart contracts. While it covers all types of financial products, it furthers STACS's sustainable finance capabilities by covering ESG Financial Products such as ESG-linked bonds, loans, funds, carbon credits, and Renewable Energy Credits ('RECs'). Vetta can interact with ESG data from ESGpedia seamlessly via APIs and execute required actions automatically, reducing the need for manual continuous monitoring.
Both ESGpedia and Vetta platforms leverage on Blockchain technology, which STACS has deep expertise in. Blockchain provides security, transparency, accountability, and automation via the immutability of the digital, distributed ledger. It aims to effectively verify and authenticate all actions carried out, preventing greenwashing, as well as provide trust for all companies onboard in terms of accessing quality ESG data that is perpetually monitored and updated in real-time.
Under ESGpedia which is currently deployed in the beta phase, STACS has ongoing partnerships with numerous leading FIs[1] and use cases in five sectors as of today: transport, building and construction, manufacturing, food and agriculture, and renewable energy. The aim is to broaden corporate sustainability actions in Singapore and the region, which in turn will influence consumer actions and choices, too.
The Singapore FinTech firm believes that collaboration and collective action are key for a purposeful green transition. As part of its full suite of ESG solutions for corporates of all sizes, STACS offers ESG Playbooks, an end-to-end service covering a growing variety of industry sectors and geographies. Under this solution, corporates embarking on green will be connected with STACS's robust ecosystem of partners to start charting their own sustainability journey and achieve greater ESG capabilities, which can include reporting and attainment of sustainability services.
Benjamin Soh, Managing Director at STACS and recently elected Chairman of the Green and Sustainable FinTech Sub-committee at the Singapore FinTech Association ('SFA'), said: "Since STACS was incorporated three years ago, we have transformed the capital markets with our technology, bringing digitalisation and automation for the financial sector and resolving five decades worth of legacy fragmentation issues via our expertise in distributed ledger technology ('DLT') and smart contracts. While there is a global shift towards sustainability, quality ESG data and financing are nascent and severely lacking. This is where we come in as The Nexus of ESG Finance. Through STACS's full suite of ESG solutions which are certified enterprise secure and interoperable with existing infrastructures, we aim to accelerate Sustainable Finance and enable all companies in their journey towards ESG."
STACS's new vision expands on the firm's good work in the capital markets since 2019. With vast domain expertise, STACS now applies its technology expertise to resolve industry-wide painpoints hindering Sustainable Finance. Its data ingestion and data management capabilities allow for effective ingestion of fragmented ESG data from multiple sources into one single digital platform for effective use by financial institutions. This builds upon its various live platform deployments for trade processing with global leading financial institutions including BNP Paribas Securities Services, Eastspring Investment, and most recently CSOP Asset Management (announced on 9 February 2022).
In 2021, the fintech firm also partnered with Deutsche Bank, UBS, Union Bank of the Philippines, Bursa Malaysia, and InvestaX, as blockchain platform provider for bonds and funds tokenization, utilizing digitalisation and smart contracts technology to automate various aspects of the lifecycle management of financial products. This same technology can be used to pre-program and automate ESG-related products, to ensure perpetual monitoring of commitment and verification to prevent greenwashing. For instance, double spending of carbon credits can be resolved by automating the retirement of the credits when certain conditions are met.
STACS believes Singapore is well-placed to be Asia's leading Green FinTech hub and seeks to continually build a vibrant Green FinTech ecosystem with its partnership with SFA and MAS's Project Greenprint.
[1] In 2021, STACS announced its partnerships with financial institutions including (in alphabetical order) Aviva Singlife, BNP Paribas Securities Services, Bursa Malaysia, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Eastspring Investments, InvestaX, Mastercard, OCBC Bank, UBS, Union Bank of the Philippines, and UOB, as well as corporates from various sectors. |
About STACS
STACS (Hashstacs Pte Ltd) is a Singapore FinTech company focused on ESG FinTech, in partnership with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) for the Project Greenprint ESG Registry. STACS serves as the Nexus of ESG Finance with its live blockchain infrastructure that enables effective Sustainable Finance, and unlocks value in Asset and Wealth Management and Digital Securities. Its clients and partners include global banks, stock exchanges, asset managers, and corporates. STACS is The Asset Triple A Digital Awards 2021 FinTech Start-Up of the Year, an Award Winner of the MAS Global FinTech Innovation Challenge Awards 2020, and also a two-times awardee of the Financial Sector Technology and Innovation (FSTI) Proof of Concept (POC) grant, under the Financial Sector Development Fund administered by the MAS.
