Sustainability is moving from the margins of investing to the heart of how capital is allocated, risks are managed, and client expectations are met. In 2025, that journey entered a new phase.
The challenge for investors is no longer whether sustainability matters; it’s how to use it well. How to navigate changing regulations, expanding datasets, new applications of AI, and growing political polarization, while staying true to fiduciary duty and client preferences.
In other words, sustainability only works when it is useful, credible, and aligned with financial decision-making.
At Clarity AI, our focus this year was clear: support investors in turning sustainability complexity into decision-ready intelligence for investment strategy, value creation, and regulator compliance.
1. From Asset Owner Mandates to Live, Investable Portfolios
The Challenge
Asset owners are becoming more prescriptive about sustainability expectations — from climate targets to exclusions, impact objectives, and regulatory constraints. Translating those expectations into investable, monitorable portfolios remains challenging as requirements evolve, reported data availability shifts with regulation, and client preferences extend beyond what companies are required to disclose.
The Value
Investors need to move from mandates and policies to portfolios that can be implemented, measured, and defended without slowing down investment processes.
What We Delivered
In 2025, Clarity AI focused on making sustainability mandates operational:
- Instant portfolio creation directly from screened universes, allowing teams to easily move from research to implementation.
- Granular mandate monitoring, with more than 800+ sustainability metrics available at organization and security levels, including raw underlying data.
- Built-in collaboration across investment, sustainability, and compliance teams.
- Expanded SDG alignment analysis, with added visibility into operational impacts and controversial practices.
The Outcome
Investors can now translate sustainability expectations into live portfolios, monitored continuously and adjusted with confidence.
2. Navigating a Shifting Regulatory Landscape
The Challenge
Sustainability regulation is evolving unevenly across regions. Some frameworks are tightening, others are being revised or delayed. Yet expectations around transparency, credibility, and the ability to substantiate sustainability claims remain as high as ever.
The Value
Investors need to comply today, prepare for tomorrow, and remain flexible as regulation continues to evolve.
What We Delivered
In 2025, we supported clients across the regulatory lifecycle:
- Fast, adaptive regulatory reporting across EU frameworks, reducing operational burden, with access to underlying data.
- Simple, ongoing monitoring of fund labels, covering 5 EU labels, including ESMA Naming Rules.
- Compliance guidance, through engagement to translate regulatory texts into practical insights.
- Forward-looking tools, such as the SFDR 2.0 Check, to allow investors to assess how funds may look under proposed regulatory changes.
The Outcome
Clarity AI reinforced its role as a long-term regulatory partner, equipping clients with tools designed to support confidence, flexibility, and preparedness in an uncertain regulatory environment.
3. AI Embedded in Investment Workflows
The Challenge
AI has moved beyond experimentation. The question is no longer whether to use AI, but how to apply it responsibly without introducing bias, opacity, or noise.
The Value
Investors need AI that augments expertise, reduces manual work, and delivers insights that can be trusted in high-stakes decisions.
What We Delivered
AI has been embedded in Clarity AI from the start. In 2025, we expanded its role from deep, back-end data collection and processing to user-facing functionality, deploying generative AI tools built on a highly curated, trustworthy dataset that reflects years of technical and domain expertise.
- Always up-to-date company risk reports, generated on demand from Clarity AI’s updated, verified datasets.
- Deep, comparable climate transition analysis for hard-to-abate sectors to support credible assessment and engagement.
The Outcome
AI is becoming a true sustainability analyst, accelerating research, increasing consistency, and freeing teams to focus on judgment, strategy, and engagement.
4. Data You Can Trust and Use
The Challenge
As the need for more granular sustainability data continues to grow — moving beyond aggregated scores to underlying metrics — trust has become the defining issue. At the same time, reported data availability may in fact decrease as regulation is simplified, making engagement, estimations, and alternative datasets more important than ever. Investors need confidence in where data comes from, how it is built, and how it changes over time.
To be effective, both investors and data providers must partner to move at the same speed, adapt to new requirements, and maintain transparency as expectations evolve.
The Value
Sustainability data must be reliable enough to support investment decisions, client communication, and regulatory scrutiny.
What We Delivered
In 2025, we strengthened data trust through transparency and context:
- Historical views and trends across key ESG Risk and climate metrics to assess progress over time.
- Direct access to raw Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions data with PCAF data quality scores to support validation and analysis.
- Clearer, more explainable Exposure analysis, moving toward a single, intuitive value with transparency into underlying drivers.
The Outcome
Sustainability data further strengthened its role as decision-grade intelligence; something investors can rely on, interrogate, and explain with confidence.
Plus, additional core enhancements included:
- Broader asset class coverage across public and private markets, including:
- Fixed income and sustainable bonds analysis
- ESG risk data and scores for 2.3 million non-listed companies, complemented by partnerships such as SESAMm or eFront by BlackRock
- Faster data delivery at scale with release cycles as short as 48 hours to support timely investment decisions and reporting.
- Always up-to-date, transparent methodologies that evolve with market practices.
Looking Ahead
At Clarity AI, our commitment remains clear: to provide the best tools in the market for a true integration of sustainability into the backbone of investment processes.
That means offering datasets that are reliable, explainable, and continuously expanding, even as reported data availability fluctuates. It means developing methodologies that are transparent, robust, and able to evolve with the market. And it means building tools that are intuitive to use and seamlessly integrated into our clients’ preferred ways of working.
Trust is foundational to that commitment. In 2025, we strengthened our Trust Center to increase transparency into how we safeguard data and apply AI responsibly. We also achieved SOC 1 Type II certification, providing independent assurance on the effectiveness of our internal controls and reinforcing our commitment to data integrity and operational reliability alongside our existing ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II accreditations.
For us, AI is not an end in itself. It is, and has always been, an answer to a challenge: how to handle complexity at scale without sacrificing trust or clarity. We apply AI in a specialized and judicious way, equipping both our teams and our clients with state-of-the-art technology to work faster, think more clearly, and make better-informed decisions.
