Inspiration
Investment enables growth and progress. Yet modern investors are increasingly mindful that this must not come at the expense of our planet and people's future. Many are eager to make informed investment decisions that generate positive social and environmental impact, alongside a financial return. We aim to equip investors with an intuitive tool that empowers them to make investment choices they deem to be beneficial for society and its future growth.
Every investor can contribute to the impact a company makes to the environment, society, and its people.
As youngsters leading busy lives, few can spare the time to conduct deep research into the ESG performance of companies before making informed investment decisions. This tool empowers us to increase the social impact of our investments at a glance/click, and to intuitively visualise the ESG performance of our portfolios. By connecting with friends and comparing portfolios, this can hopefully ignite conversations around sustainable investment.
What it does
It gathers information on the ESG performance of companies (potential investment targets) by web scraping public information from professional databases / analytics companies. A side-by-side view of companies allows investors to enjoy direct and visual comparison before making investment decisions. It also visualises the ESG metrics of an investor's portfolio after investments are made, and tracks its change over time.
How we built it
PDF miner is used to parse the sustainability report to analyse the ESG performance of a company. Selenium and Beautiful Soup webdriver is used to parse webpages that shows ESG evaluations and scores of companies. Libraries such as yfinance allows for access to public information on companies which also lets us gather numerical data on company finances and sustainability scores. Matplotlib generates clear and concise graphics. Finally, HTML and CSS is used to create a webpage that ties the backend functions together as a clear and presentable application.
Challenges we ran into
None of us have prior experience in languages other than python and C++, as well as UI design, so we had to learn on the job for designing websites, and scraping the web/pdf files for information.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Web Scraper that does all information collecting in the background and only requires a flexible input of company name Learning how to code graphics
What we learned
We learnt some javascript, html, and gained experience in learning from scratch and building programs from research. We learnt to filter information and extract insights from online sources automatically and sanitising output for use.
What's next for Sustainable Investment
Integrate voice input (Deepgram?) for better UX on mobile devices
Partnership with professional companies with ESG scoring and ranking criteria to receive professional and all-rounded information and evaluation to provide consumers with.
We can turn this into a mouseover pop-up / browser extension that conveniently appears on the same page of whatever investment website/platform being used (say, Etoro).
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