August 13, 2021

Nomura Uses NLP for SDG Bond Determination

Nomura Securities Co. (NSC) announced Aug. 11 that it began researching possibilities to use natural language processing (NLP) technology for the purpose of determining SDG bonds.

The company is supported in this project by Sony Computer Science Laboratories. Together, the two companies will evaluate the relevance of how funds are used to achieve SDGs using NLP to analyze the prospectuses and sustainability reports of the issuers.

Corporate bonds not classified as SDG bonds will be evaluated to determine how much they possess characteristics of sustainability bonds in order to expand the investment target universe while quantifying and refining SDG bond determination.

NSC and Nomura Research Institute first launched the NOMURA-BPI SDGs index consisting of green bonds, social bonds and sustainability bonds in November 2019. The knowledge of this index will be combined with Sony CSL’s technology development for the project, which will be elaborated on at a later date through seminars.