Summary

BlueOnion tackles major Greenwashing activities across the entire financial ecosystem, from the supply chain to product manufacturers to distributors, to protect the end consumers. With that, our primary objective at BlueOnion is to mitigate and avoid greenwashing risks across the entire financial ecosystem. It is, therefore, crucial to start the data process at the beginning of the value chain, which begins at the investee (corporate and sovereign) level. Most data sets on the market offer financial and sustainability data as standalone products without integration and primarily address the issues of companies. BlueOnion sees the gap and thinks sufficient data and analysis must be provided to bridge that gap so that a product examiner can be satisfied with products across asset classes, including bonds (whether corporate or sovereign) in developed and emerging markets.

Nowadays, BlueOnion helps asset managers find, analyze, construct, and monitor green and sustainable portfolios through its data intelligence to make logical, quantifiable, and more timely decisions. The portal covers 42,000 global companies and 300,000+ Funds, ETFs, and Bonds and measures them using 105 sovereign metrics and 245 corporate metrics across 113 sovereign nations and countries, 22 sectors, and 130 industries.

Description of fintech solution

Using the turnkey Software as a Service (SaaS cloud-based), code-free portal, asset managers can find, analyze, construct, and monitor their portfolios under one roof. By seeing through the full constituent of companies, the asset managers themselves, and their competitors and benchmarks, the fund managers can see-through financial and sustainability performances of each company and identify the gaps that need to be bridged, the laggards in the portfolio, confront controversial activities, develop goals and resolutions, monitor progress, and make wise decisions to either support, downgrade, underweight or divest.

With the BlueOnion Platform as a Service (PaaS) and our architecture built out in a modular manner, our solutions can be deployed featuring the functionality and specific data points the users desire. We offer our clients the ability to build and develop based on their existing proprietary framework or quickly ingest a different standard. Our highly agile tech and data architecture allows our solutions to be scaled and tailored easily without costing the customer a fortune. Cloud computing also supports timely and informative analytics detailing all companies' current and historic ESG performance.

Describe your key innovations

All BlueOnion modules are code-free and cloud-based solutions that require no programming skills or experts in sustainability practices. Churning over 10+M data daily and millions of algorithms and scripts help our customers improve their operational efficiency by a minimum of 80%.

BlueOnion mitigates banks' greenwashing risks by offering a comprehensive 360-degree examination of investment products. Utilizing advanced tech, data intelligence, and solutions, BlueOnion ensures compliance with global anti-greenwashing frameworks, standards, regulations, and taxonomies. Our cloud solution ensures that investment products offered to retail clients align with the latest guidelines for green labeling.

BlueOnion utilizes prominent frameworks such as EU SFDR, UNSDG, UNGC, SASB/ISSB, and the upcoming CGT to identify and detect greenwashing in all investment products, whether approved or not yet approved. It also identifies products aligned or misaligned with EU regulations, specifically Article 8 (ESG characteristics integrated) and Article 9 (positive impact) products. Even though there isn't an international standard to measure greenwashing, BlueOnion ensures the highest standard of sustainability alignment measurement by setting a rigorous benchmark for anti-greenwashing taxonomies to examine the underlying constituent companies thoroughly and at an aggregate fund level. BlueOnion’s proprietary methodology applies a highly rigorous approach to measure the alignment of products to avoid the risks of a product already onboarded eventually being downgraded.

By adopting an international anti-greenwashing framework such as the EU SFDR, both the Asset and Wealth Management teams can quickly simulate, validate/test an investment product's (whether labeled or non-labeled funds) ESG characteristics, greenness and brownness by reading the level of the products' carbon intensity, GHG emissions, footprint, waste pollution, water resources management, etc., on the environmental front, and meeting 18 mandatory Principle Adverse Indicators (PAI) including gender pay gap, human rights or violation of international norms, and over 90 voluntary indicators, and that they are Doing No Significant Harm (DNSH) to society while comparing to their peers and their respective benchmarks.

Asset managers can find, analyze, construct, and monitor using our simulation engine to optimize the anti-greenwashing scenarios. The buy and sell sides of funds can track the investment products' pathways to net zero based on the initial SBTi commitment (or the lack thereof) by drilling down to the constituent company's level monthly/quarterly/semi-annually or annually. Expose the portfolio companies of the fund's environmental, social, governance, and financial materiality by seeing 250+ indicators, their sensitive countries' business involvement, such as terrorism and war criminals, and governments that are known to have severe human rights issues on an aggregated and weighted basis.

Solution Lifecycle

Commercialized

Founder's Background

Elsa is a finance industry veteran who focuses on sustainable, responsible, and impact investing. She advocates for investor protection and drives compelling propositions that benefit real change for the finance community. She is the Group CEO and founder of the FinTech portal BlueOnion. Her mission for BlueOnion is to steer financial services providers toward ethical practices to address climate change and social injustice, helping investors achieve optimal returns with the highest moral responsibilities.

In addition to leading BlueOnion, Elsa is the investment governor of a family office in Asia and a Committee member of the Hong Kong Council of Social Services Development Fund. AsiaWeek once named her one of Asia’s Most Influential Women.

Founded (Years of Incorporation)

2020

How are you funded today?

Series A

Money Raised

USD 7.65 Million

Number of employees

45

Presence In Region

Asia
Europe
Southeast Asia

Technology

Application Programming Interface (API)
Cloud solutions
Data automation
ESG
Regtech
Risk Assessment
Wealthtech

HQ Country

Singapore

What are the top 3 key benefits your solution will bring to the Asset Management Industry?

Key Benefits:

1/ Save Time - with over 300K+ Global Funds and ETFs, 42K+ global companies under one roof, and 250+ Financial and Sustainability indicators, there is no need to work with multiple data sources and platforms

2/Save Costs - millions of dollars were wasted annually collecting, analyzing, and reporting climate data. BlueOnion costs a small fraction of that by allowing the banks to modularize the data needed to validate and monitor investment products over time.

3/ Benefit from Human and Data Intelligence under one roof - to help banks avoid the war for talents by getting the best-in-class technology, data and concordance, sustainability expert analytics, and modeling and instant aggregation, saving a team of human hours to collect, analyze, and validate.

On average, BlueOnion improves our asset and wealth managers' operation efficiency by 80%.

Tell us more about your past client engagements to date and your market penetration?

Benefiting from the millions of data collected from third-party and investment managers, BlueOnion built its products from three significant iterations with over 100 pilot users from the buy and the sell side of investments across all asset classes.

Since the launch of our initial version in Q3 2022, our focus has been on fund managers and investment management professionals (such as family offices) in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Over 2023, the firm has developed new products and features, with strategic alignment to adopting potential regulations, such as SFDR, as the core mandate. As SFDR sets the standard and places funds into categories, regulators worldwide are conducting due diligence and in the process of adopting. Our target clients have expanded to other verticals of the investment management and financial services stakeholders, such as wealth management sales and marketing, product due diligence analysts, investment compliance, and risk management managers.

BlueOnion now has clients in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore across Fund Management, wealth management sales, family office, insurance brokerage, and securities brokerage.

In 2023, BlueOnion succeeded in every award we entered or were nominated for; we won the ICT Fintech Bronze Award, the IFTA ESG Integration Diamond Award, and the top three at the Green and Sustainable Banking Fintech Competition hosted by HKMA.

Do you have any case studies of your solution? If yes, please share it in less than 200 words

Case study 1:
A family office based in Singapore invests in both public securities (funds and equities); the family office started by using our Portfolio Hub and Fund Hub, which allows a user to construct, analyze, and monitor a portfolio's financial and ESG performance, which can consist of equities and mutual funds. Consequently, a subscription to Fund Screener was added, a tool that identifies funds based on multiple filters, allowing users to search the marketplace for funds that match their investment needs. Through our platform, they identified various Southeast Asian funds with exposure to Vietnam that matched their investment criteria.

Case study 2:
One of the largest banks in Hong Kong, entirely dedicated to embracing and upholding ESG principles, has established a transparent, solid, and robust governance structure and is committed to meeting international standards in sustainability, such as SFDR. We are committed to offering customers global investment products (but please try to avoid the alignment with CN) that are green and sustainable while making decent returns. The bank uses BlueOnion's in-depth analysis and ratings on funds' ESG and sustainability performance to align funds with SFDR's Article 6, 8, and 9 classifications. They leverage BlueOnion's advanced ESG database and intuitive visualization that provides in-depth analysis and ratings on the ESG and sustainability performance of funds. This tool aligned their offerings with regulatory requirements and ensured they genuinely embody and reflect the bank's commitment to sustainability. It also enhances the bank's due diligence processes, allowing them to offer products that reflect our sustainability commitments and meet their customers' expectations on what they support, such as a low carbon economy against controversial weapons. By employing this strategic approach and accessing the ESG database, they can ensure their offerings are compliant with current regulations and positioned to adapt to future changes in the ESG landscape.

Case study 3:
A prominent asset manager in Taiwan wanted to roll out an ESG-labeled fund and has given BlueOnion a specific scope of exclusions and green revenue thresholds. The goal was to ensure consistency within the team, from the analysts doing research and monitoring to the portfolio managers making the decisions. The critical criteria being measured and scoped are Scope 1 & 2 of carbon emission intensity and carbon footprint of the portfolio, the underlying materiality factors for their company sectors and industries, UNGC's detailed analysis across anti-corruption, human rights, labor rights, and environment impact, as well as temperature alignment of each constituent companies via the SBTi approval and commitment status. The use case is focused on implementing strategic ideas into a simulated portfolio (using the Portfolio+ module) with qualified companies researched on BlueOnion's Fund Screener for weight and allocation.

Awards/Accolades

Within the first year of our platform entering the market, BlueOnion has already been recognized with prestigious accolades.

We are proud recipients of the following awards:

1/ The top three at the 2024 HKMA Green FinTech Competition for the Stream of Green and Sustainable Finance
2/ IFTA Diamond Award for FinTech with ESG Initiative of the year 2023 and the
3/ Hong Kong ICT FinTech Awards 2023
4/ Grand Award of the Year 2024, Hong Kong Brand Design Awards

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