Contact: Karim Derrick, Joe Cunningham

Kennedys IQ and Vested Impact have announced a new collaboration to drive the use of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) data throughout the insurance industry.

This collaboration will deliver on a growing market need for the integration of external data to support underwriting, claims and risk & compliance functions; thereafter expanding to corporate supply chain management. Kennedys IQ will be further supporting its clients’ decision-making through a combination of transparent and explainable algorithmic approaches and cognitive decision-making science expertise.

Kimberley Abbott, founder and CEO of Vested Impact comments, “We’re thrilled to collaborate with Kennedy’s IQ to provide actionable activity-level and market-specific ESG and impact insights. Together, we aim to foster a more sustainable and resilient insurance ecosystem. This partnership enhances our mission of driving actionable decision-making on social and sustainability issues within the financial services sector.”

Vested Impact were recently a showcase company for the United Kingdom at COP28, where they were selected for their potential to help combat global sustainability challenges through their platform. The startup has also been involved with various high-profile initiatives in the fintech marketplace.

Vested Impact adopts an advanced algorithmic methodology that differs to existing ESG focused metrics, going beyond standard ESG metrics of assessing the internal operations and self-disclosed declarations of a company. Rather, Vested Impact assesses and quantifies the external material impact of a company’s products and services on people and the planet, leveraging more than 300 million science-based and impact datapoints, resulting in fit-for-purpose impact data.

“ESG is no longer a mere trend, it’s a powerful force reshaping risk assessment, corporate governance and sustainability. We’re so pleased to be working with Vested Impact on driving the use of improved ESG data, it is an exciting and complementing feature to the Reputation Advisor project, a future feature of the IQ Platform”, explains Karim Derrick, Chief Product Officer, Kennedys IQ.

Working with specialty D&O underwriting agency, Rising Edge, to whom the IQ Platform is deployed, Vested Impact and Kennedys IQ hope to gain valuable industry insights and also enable them to reap the early benefits of this work, through continued collaboration and working principle of Open Innovation – bringing together different perspectives, from all walks of life, from industry to academia.

Looking ahead, Kennedys IQ will be expanding their IQ Platform with future features such as SmartPolicy and Reputation Advisor. These features will break new ground in helping insurer clients identify, manage and mitigate risk: from sophisticated analysis of policy documents to identifying real-world events through a blend of traditional algorithmic approaches and large language models (LLMs).