Case Kapitalförvaltning (Case) is a boutique wealth and fund manager, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. They’re one of the few genuinely independent asset managers in the country and manage a full range of active investment products for individuals and families. In 2022, Case partnered with Clarity AI to enhance their ESG strategy with access to deeper, more insightful data and reports so they can manage their funds and investments with a keen eye to both sustainability and profitability.
The Opportunity
The Solution
The Results
Building a Strong and Sustainable Foundation
Case is ambitious not only with their growth plans as a company, but with their sustainability and ESG goals as well. They are committed to concrete goals like going net-zero by 2050, managing ESG risks, and helping to create a better world through their investment strategy.
Victoria Dunbäck, Head of Sustainability at Case, is leading the company’s ESG research analysis. Since she started her role 18 months ago, she’s led the screening of Case’s holdings and portfolio companies every month. Her data science and analysis background have provided a strong foundation for her role as sustainability lead, while still focusing on fund success and profits as well.
“I believe sustainability and profitability are deeply intertwined. No company can be truly successful in the long term if it isn’t fundamentally sustainable. As investors, we must see the bigger picture and have the right tools to make impactful decisions.” – Victoria Dunbäck, Head of Sustainability at Case
Preparing for a More Sustainable Future
While Case has long felt a responsibility as fund managers to ensure their investments help create a better world, Victoria’s role as appointed head of sustainability is new. She is tasked with helping Case meet their ambitious sustainability goals and contributions, like ensuring that their funds support the transition to a low-carbon economy and make impactful contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
To ensure these commitments and aspirations, they needed a data provider that could help them via contributing to high-quality research, tracking their progress, and guiding them toward the investment decisions that will help them get there faster.
This is where Clarity AI came in. Victoria had explored several other solutions, but Clarity AI stood out by providing a smooth workflow and actionable insights, making it easy to track and analyze portfolios efficiently.
“Some of the tools I tested assumed many manual steps, like uploading and matching portfolio holdings one by one, which seemed quite time-consuming. Clarity AI streamlines this process, making it more seamless, and differences becomes clear when you compare user experience.” – Victoria Dunbäck, Head of Sustainability at Case
Here’s how Clarity AI became the partner Victoria needed to prepare Case to meet their future goals while growing as a company as well.
Providing Meaningful, Insightful ESG Data is Easier with Clarity AI
Empowered by Clarity AI’s platform, Victoria was able to take on two major challenges: the need for heavily Victoria is the sole appointed ESG analyst at Case, so her effectiveness in her role is dependent on how much time she spends on her research and administrative tasks.
One of her recurring responsibilities is doing a monthly deep dive on Case’s sustainability progress. This analysis used to take her significant time and energy to read the related news, to understand the data, and to write up her findings. Using Clarity AI, she’s found that she saves so much time on her research that she can spend more time on value-added tasks like research on private companies and collaborating with her colleagues.
“If I save time on manual steps in the analysis process, I can spend more time sharing insights, collaborating with my colleagues, and bringing the analysis together in a meaningful way — which is what ultimately enables us to make an impact,” said Victoria.
Using Clarity AI has also enhanced her own research skills, so she’s even more effective with her time as well.
“Clarity has given me a strong foundation for what to look for when analyzing a company. When I save time through Clarity and GenAI, it also helps me understand which indicators to prioritize in my next analysis. And if I’m assessing a smaller company that isn’t covered by Clarity, I can use Clarity’s structure almost as a template—drawing on its ESG risk indicators and focusing on similar elements in the company’s reports, especially if it operates in an industry I’ve already reviewed. That way, I can make more consistent and meaningful comparisons.” – Victoria Dunbäck, Head of Sustainability at Case
Her overall effectiveness in her role is heightened, as the GenAI acts like a true partner and helper to complement her already significant research and administrative skills.
CHALLENGE 2
Data Overwhelm
The ESG finance space doesn’t suffer from a lack of data — if anything, it struggles with data overload. The real challenge is not just accessing all this information but ensuring its quality and understanding how to use it effectively, especially when time is limited and regulatory expectations are high.
Clarity AI has been helping Victoria sort through this data overwhelm and understand what the meaning behind and usefulness of the data is, driving more informed decision-making.
For example, recently she was researching a big company in Sweden as a possible investment. In a brief glance at the data, she could see that it was scored pretty well overall at 76, but in one specific area on the chart it was scored at a 1. So she asked Clarity’s GenAI why the score in that specific area was so low, and it informed her that it was because of a previous issue with employee injuries, but that the company now has policies in place to prevent those issues in the future.
This additional context and insight, in addition to a simple numeric score, gave her the information she needed to confidently make an initial investment decision.
Victoria also finds the company briefs feature helpful. Instead of just giving her a huge data dump to manually analyze on her own, it gives her specifics to guide her research. For example, it will tell her that the company she’s researching is in a certain industry, and so the brief will focus on specific data points that are most relevant to that industry, with key success indicators as well.
Plus, the briefs tell her not just what the company is doing now, but also what they could do in the future to improve their scores.
“I think it’s important to identify potential areas for improvement in a prospective investment, to understand what would be key for strengthening their sustainability efforts and assess how they are currently performing — for example, identifying in what areas they are already performing well and where their priorities are,” said Victoria.
Summary of Results: Sustainable Financial Growth
Clarity AI’s platform has enabled Case to:
Use Data Meaningfully
Save Time on Research
What’s Next for Case
Looking ahead, Case plans to explore further use cases for Clarity AI so they can expand their usage of it, as they’ve seen significant positive results.
With Clarity AI as a teammate, Victoria and the rest of the team at Case are well-positioned to grow the company to even greater heights and to serve their customers with even more expertise.