Towards a Faceted Taxonomy of Financial Services

In this post we are after a flexible financial services taxonomy that can help us understand both existing and evolving financial system developments. To this end we examine a range of existing classification systems and synthesize the salient requirements.

Reading Time: 27 min.
Who Needs a New Financial Services Taxonomy? Our age is increasingly dominated by the dual challenges and opportunities of the sustainability transition on the one hand, and digital transformation on the other. We witness emerging new financial domains with novel names such as Fintech , or TechFin, or various combinations and hues of Green and Sustainable in Sustainable Finance and we see forces that are reshaping the direction of travel for the financial industry.
Connecting the Dots, Tensor Representations of Activitypub Networks

Connecting the Dots, Tensor Representations of Activitypub Networks

Connecting the Dots, Tensor Representations of Activitypub Networks

Reading Time: 4 min.
What are ActivityPub Networks? ActivityPub is a technical specification towards decentralized (more precisely, federated) social networking (termed the Fediverse) based upon the exchange of ActivityStreams messages that follow the Activity Vocabulary. The ActivityPub proposal has been standardized and published by the W3C and has motivated the design of several federated social networking systems. There are presently several concrete ActivityPub compliant implementations and the protocol sees meaningful adoption, primarily in the domain of federated social networks.
Open Risk Academy Course: Tensor Calculations with the Eigen C++ Library

Open Risk Academy Course: Tensor Calculations with the Eigen C++ Library

A DeepDive using the Eigen C++ Library to perform Tensor calculations

Reading Time: 3 min.
Course Objective The objective of the course is to provide an introduction to using Eigen::Tensor as a high-level library for using Tensors in C++ projects. We learn the concept and techniques of the Eigen Tensor class How to declare, initialize Tensors of various ranks and types and how to access Tensor elements Elementary unary and binary operations involving Tensors More complex operations (reductions, contractions) Modifying the shape of Tensors The course is now live at the Academy, the github repository hosts C++ scripts used in the course.
Awesome Sustainable Finance

Awesome Sustainable Finance

A curated list of sustainable finance resources

Reading Time: 4 min.
An Awesome List for Sustainable Finance. Awesome Sustainable Finance is a curated list of sustainable finance resources. The focus of the list is on code (tools, libraries, frameworks etc.) that fairly directly support any type of sustainable finance effort but also open data that are useful in a sustainable finance context. Image Credit: StarwallOfRadical.town, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons How to Contribute The list is maintained on github so the easiest way to contribute is to open a Pull Request in our repository.
Climate Dictionary Quiz

Climate Dictionary Quiz

The Climate Dictionary Quiz is now accessible as a course at the Open Risk Academy. The Quiz is based on the UN Climate Dictionary and provides an interactive educational tool to enable deeper understanding of the essential terminology.

Reading Time: 1 min.
The Climate Dictionary is an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) aimed at providing people worldwide with a simplified guide to understand climate change. The Dictionary (first published Aug 2023) seeks to bridge the gap between complex scientific jargon such as present in the IPCC publications and other scientific bodies and the public. Image: NASA Temperature Anomaly The Dictionary selects several dozen important climate concepts that are currently actively discussed worldwide with the aim to make them more accessible and relatable to individuals from various backgrounds and levels of expertise.
Electrifying the Doughnut: Simplified Visions of Sustainable Finance

Electrifying the Doughnut: Simplified Visions of Sustainable Finance

Reading Time: 30 min.

June 21 2023 marks the sixth annual #ShowYourStripes Day - a time when meteorologists and other climate communicators around the world raise awareness of our warming planet by displaying colorful visuals of climate change. The warming stripe graphics are representations of the change in temperature over the past 100+ years (here we use the global average). Each stripe represents the temperature averaged over a year. The stripes typically start around the year 1900 and finish in 2022.

Equinox 0.7 release focuses on scope 2 (electricity) emissions

Equinox 0.7 release focuses on scope 2 (electricity) emissions

New data models introduced in this release of Equinox cater to the requirement of integrating energy attribute certificate information into the portfolio database.

Reading Time: 3 min.
GHG Accounting offers a means of measuring the direct and indirect emissions to the Earth’s Biosphere of CO2 and its equivalent gases from industrial and other activities. GHG Accounting is a rapidly developing area that has come to receive increased focus in the context of accelerating Climate Change. Given that the generation of electricity and heat accounts for around a third of global GHG emissions electricity consumers have incentives to proactively reduce those emissions by reducing electricity demand, or by shifting energy supply by procuring alternative lower-carbon or renewable resources.
Mathematical Representations of Credit Portfolio Data

Mathematical Representations of Credit Portfolio Data

What do we mean by credit data? This post is a discussion around mathematical terminology and concepts that are useful in the context of working with credit data, taking us from network graph representations of credit systems to commonly used reference data sets

Reading Time: 27 min.
Definition of Credit Data What do we mean by credit data? For our purposes Credit Data is any well-defined dataset that has direct applications in the assessment of the Credit Risk of an individual or an organization, or, more generally, a dataset that allows the application of data driven Credit Portfolio Management policies. The appearance of credit data is quite familiar to practitioners: A spreadsheet, or a table in a database, with a number of columns and rows full of all sorts of information about borrowers and loans.
First public release of the Solstice simulation framework

First public release of the Solstice simulation framework

Solstice is a flexible open source economic network simulator. Its primary outcomes are quantitative analyses of the behavior of economic systems under uncertainty. In this post we provide a first overall description of Solstice to accompany the first public release.

Reading Time: 5 min.
Modeling economic networks and their dynamics Economic networks are the primary abstractions though which we can conceptualize the state (condition) and evolution of economic interactions. This simply reflects the fact that human economies are quite fundamentally systems of interacting actors (or nodes in a network) with transient or more permanent relations between them. In practice the network character of an economy is frequently suppressed or under-emphasized and does not play a particularly important role.
Open Risk White Paper: Deep Linking Financial and Energy Accounting

Open Risk White Paper: Deep Linking Financial and Energy Accounting

We develop a conceptual framework for integrated accounting that imposes on certain non-financial disclosures the same double-entry balance constraints that apply to conventional financial statements. We identify the key ingredients required for a rigorous multidimensional accounting framework in terms of concepts, postulates and design choices, and we illustrate these ideas with a worked-out example of linking financial and energy accounts.

Reading Time: 9 min.
Integrated Energy Accounting is keeping track and reporting on an entity’s detailed energy footprint (primary inputs, transformations and waste generation) not as an addendum to financial accounting and reporting but as a deeply-linked extension that is subject to the same level of rigor. The central design is the use of multidimensional double-entry bookkeeping which tracks additional quantitative information characterizing economic objects beyond their monetary values. This choice ensures the enforcement of both classic balance sheet constraints and the applicable energy conservation laws.
How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 4

How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 4

In the fourth part of this series we approach Green Public Procurement as a Sustainable Portfolio Management task and explore how open data can support this mission

Reading Time: 9 min.
Introduction In this fourth and final installment we will discuss how the data framework we have developed thus far can be mapped into classic portfolio management concepts and categories, and thus, how one can articulate the concept of sustainable procurement management on a portfolio basis. The concepts and analytic methodologies of financial portfolio management1 can significantly enhance the toolkit available to practitioners and, in sense, connects the domain of Green Public Procurement to other ongoing initiatives in broader Sustainable Finance.
How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 3

How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 3

In the third part of this series we illustrate how one may assign greenhouse gas emissions to public procurement using environmentally extended input-output models

Reading Time: 10 min.
Introduction This is the third in a series of posts where we explore the role of Open Data and Open Source in enabling and accelerating the broad based effort towards Green Public Procurement (GPP). In this third installment we will link procurement entities to private sector sellers and, through the sectoral profile of the procurement contract, (CPV category) we will infer the amount of CO2 emissions that can be attributed to these activities.
How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 2

How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 2

In the second part of this series we explore how to construct an economic network representation of the public procurement universe

Reading Time: 10 min.
Introduction This is the second in a series of posts where we explore the role of Open Data and Open Source in enabling and accelerating the broad based effort towards Green Public Procurement (GPP). Recap of the Previous Post Part 1 - Overview In the first part of this series we motivated and defined the scope of a study that explores Public Procurement data. We discussed the meaning of the main relevant terms (Open Data, Open Source, Green Public Procurement) and briefly reviewed the current state and challenges of the latter in EU context.
How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 1

How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 1

In the first part of this series we survey the TED procurement data landscape to build the context in which we will explore the relevance of this open data set for green public procurement

Reading Time: 13 min.
Introduction In a series of posts we will explore the role of Open Data and Open Source in enabling and accelerating the broad based effort towards Green Public Procurement (GPP). There are several important (and possibly obscure) terms in this sentence, so our first order of business will be to unpack them. What is Public Procurement Let us start with the term Public Procurement which will be the main domain of interest in this study.
EU Datathon 2022 preselection for the Equinox platform

EU Datathon 2022 preselection for the Equinox platform

We are very happy to announce that our EU Datathon 2022 proposal based on the equinox platform has been pre-selected to enter the formal stage of the competition

Reading Time: 2 min.
What is the EU Datathon? The EU Datathon is an annual Open Data competition organised by the Publications Office of the European Union since 2017. The competitions are organised to create new value for citizens through innovation and promoting the use of open data, in particular the datasets available on the official portal for European data. Every year, EU Datathon calls for innovators from around the world to come up with new ways of using open data to address important societal and environmental challenges, with the condition that they use at least one of the thousands of data sets published on data.
Equinox 0.4 release focuses on green public procurement functionality

Equinox 0.4 release focuses on green public procurement functionality

On Earth Day 2022 we are happy to release a significant update of Equinox, the open source platform supporting sustainable portfolio management

Reading Time: 1 min.
Equinox 0.4 Release Equinox is an open source platform that supports holistic risk management and reporting in the context of Sustainable Portfolio Management. The platform integrates geospatial information with applicable regulatory and industry standards, for example the GHG Protocol (accounting for Project based, Corporate and City-Wide greenhouse gas emissions), the IPCC Emissions Factor database and further reference data, the PCAF attribution methodologies (and more) to provide a holistic view of the footprint of both individual projects and portfolios.
Two New Taxonomies Introduced in the Open Risk Manual

Two New Taxonomies Introduced in the Open Risk Manual

Reading Time: 3 min.
The Role of Open Risk Manual Taxonomies A taxonomy is the categorization of concepts. It can be a very useful tool in supporting effective knowledge management. Fundamentally a taxonomy is a scheme of classification, typically a hierarchical classification, in which things or concepts are organized into groups or types of increasing specificity. Mathematically, a hierarchical taxonomy is a tree structure of classifications for a given set of objects. It is sometimes also named a containment hierarchy.
Input-Output Models as Graph Networks

Input-Output Models as Graph Networks

We discuss the relation of economic input-output models with graph theory and networks

Reading Time: 15 min.
Motivation Fig 1. An economic network as a graph. The economy is a complex tangle of various agents that interact via transactions (sales and purchases) and contracts (lending, investing). In recent times more and more techniques from graph theory and network science are brought to bear on economic analysis. On the other hand, ever since the seminal contributions of Leontief, Input-Output Models (IO) have been widely used to describe economic relationships between economic actors (e.
Open Risk Academy Course: Input-Output Models with Python

Open Risk Academy Course: Input-Output Models with Python

A DeepDive Course into using Python to work with Input-Output Models

Reading Time: 2 min.
What are Input-Output Models? Environmentally Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output (EE-MRIO) tables describe economic relationships of economic actors (e.g. industrial sectors) operating within and between regions and their environmental repercussions. An EE MRIO augments the more basic and historically first proposed Input-Output Models (IO) with additional datasets and/or modeling assumptions in order to provide insights into the environmental foorprint of economic activity. Presently, the emphasis on negative externalities of economic activity (e.g., climate change, biodiversity loss) turns EE MRIO models into a useful conceptual and analytic tool.
Exploring Ten Years of FOSDEM talks

Exploring Ten Years of FOSDEM talks

We look into ten years of FOSDEM conference data to start getting to grips with the open source phenomenon and also explore techniques for data review and exploratory data analysis using (of course) open source python tools. In the process we identify the imprint of the pandemic on attendance, the longest ever title, the distribution of mindshare of time and some notable newcomers.

Reading Time: 12 min.
FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized, two-day conference celebrating free and open-source software development. The conference has a geographic focus on European open source ecosystems and projects. FOSDEM is primarily aimed at developers, across the entire range of software and aims to enable them to meet and discuss the status of projects. We look into ten years of FOSDEM conference data to start getting to grips with the open source phenomenon and also explore techniques for data review and exploratory data analysis using (of course) open source python tools.