Equilibrium Risk Advisory tell us about their aspirations for Data Pitch and beyond.

While there is growing awareness and knowledge of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investment strategies within the EU financial sector, assessing the social and environmental risks of investments remains a largely qualitative exercise.

Equilibrium Risk Advisory is a UK-based startup that is building a quantitative tool to help investors measure the financial impact of climate-related risks. We spoke to Director Hannah Van Den Bergh about their plans for Data Pitch.

What do you hope to achieve on the Data Pitch accelerator?

We hope to significantly develop our tool and econometric model into a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that we can take to market for investment. We plan to spend the six months testing out some of our climate interventions – asking questions like “what is the impact of a carbon tax on the transport sector?” – and validating them with our private data set.

We will also use the time to increase our connections with business leaders in the financial industry to seek advice and develop a product that is relevant to the needs of our target market.

What shared data will you work with and how will you use it?

We are working with portfolio data shared by New College Capital as part of Data Pitch’s Open Challenge (harnessing the full power of data-driven innovation).

We will be using the data to validate the assumptions in our economic model, to build an upload function and to explore additions we can make to our model informed by data.

Why do you think it is important for startups to work with large scale data providers?

Using real world data gives us the opportunity to build a product for our target market in a way that is relevant and realistic. Without access to shared data, it would take us far longer to understand our potential clients’ needs.

What’s the best thing about working with data?

Data tells a story. There is so much to uncover with large datasets – the opportunities are endless!

If you could change one thing about the data ecosystem what would it be?

In order to drive innovation, startups and SMEs need more open access to data.