Crédit Agricole CIB has launched a platform that uses AI to help corporates track the ESG performance of their value chains.
The lender says it is Asia Pacific’s first ESG-linked, AI-powered trade finance solution.
The product, dubbed Smart Platform Assisted SustainablE (Spase), uses trade transaction data to create what the bank describes as “a measurable and auditable view of ESG performance across suppliers, products and trade flows”.
Crédit Agricole said the platform is designed to address the bottlenecks caused by the “manual, supplier-by-supplier ESG assessment process” as firms look to increase the transparency of their sustainability efforts.
The platform uses AI to turn raw transaction data into aggregated ESG dashboards for each transaction in a trade finance portfolio, allowing corporates to direct more business to high-scoring suppliers while incentivising suppliers to achieve better ESG scores.
After piloting the product in Hong Kong, Crédit Agricole now plans to roll out the platform throughout the Asia Pacific region.
Parth Agrawal, head of international trade and transaction banking for Hong Kong at Crédit Agricole, said that Spase “sets a new benchmark, ensuring transparency and accountability across every link of the global value chain, while bringing tangible benefits to our clients”.
Antoine Rose, head of sustainable investment banking for APAC and Middle East at the lender, added: “Sustainable development remains a top priority across the Asia Pacific financial sector but execution may sometimes falter due to resource constraints.
“As a sustainable finance leader, we have leveraged our green financing expertise and technological innovation capabilities to innovate with Spase.”
Crédit Agricole has bolstered its renewable energy focus over the past 12 months. In December last year, the European Investment Bank agreed to provide a €500mn counter-guarantee to the French bank to support wind-related investments across Europe.
