Societe Generale – one of Europe’s leading financial services groups, which supports its clients in their environmental and energy transition by providing responsible and innovative financing solutions – and Altalurra Ventures – a fund investing in technological start-ups with an positive impact – “are investing in impak ratings to with the ambition for the company to be Europe’s leading analysis and impact rating agency, with a Series A for €4.5 million funding.”
Launched in 2019 and based in Montreal and Paris, impak ratings “aims to be the leading European impact analysis and rating agency.”
The start-up has already “signed with around twenty clients thanks to its innovative and unique methodology.” The company “provides financial institutions with high-quality impact analysis, based on the most consensual and rigorous industry standards allowing transparency, comparability and data contextualization.”
By assessing how companies mitigate their negative impacts and how they create positive effects, as compared to the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, impak ratings “goes beyond the traditional analysis of ESG issues thanks to a dual materiality approach consisting of studying the impact of the environment on the company and the impact of the company on its environment.”
This approach is now “recognized as being instrumental to enabling the financial sector be a catalyst for the transformation of our economies, which today explains the company’s collaboration with major players in the market, such as Societe Generale.”
Indeed, it is thanks to this differentiating positioning that the company was able to convince its new partners, whose participation “will considerably accelerate the development of the start-up.”
In addition to its investment, Societe Generale group, through its Global Banking and Advisory division, in December 2021 “chose impak ratings as a partner to provide impact analysis for all its corporate clients and integrate the ratings into the bank’s standard business processes.”
Pierre Palmieri, Head of Global Banking and Advisory, Societe Generale, said:
“We are pleased with the strengthening of this strategic partnership with impak ratings. Having a good understanding of our clients’ environmental and social issues is essential to in supporting them going further with their responsibility roadmap. By welcoming the start-up into Societe Generale Ventures, Societe Generale is contributing to accelerating the environmental and social transformation of its clients’ activities.”
Altalurra is also “making a similar choice by signing a co-development agreement with impak ratings meeting the best impact reporting practices for institutional investors in Europe and around the world.”
The financial sector is currently “undergoing a deep transformation.”
As key players in the financing of the economy, banks are “increasingly taking up environmental and societal challenges to become strong enablers in this transition.”
To support these changes, they need “to integrate high-quality data and impact analysis into their decision-making and business processes.” The synergies that are emerging today “between impak ratings and its partners are fully in line with this approach, which aims to set coherent targets in the impact measurement process.”