Hydrus Helps Companies Improve ESG Performance

Steve Jurczak
January 18, 2023 | Updated: January 26, 2023
#BuiltWithMongoDB#Startups

More organizations are embracing workforce diversity, environmental sustainability, and responsible corporate governance in an effort to improve their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance. As investors increasingly favor ESG in their portfolios, organizations are under greater pressure to capture, store, and verify ESG metrics. San Francisco-based startup, Hydrus, is helping companies make ESG data more usable and actionable.

The platform

Hydrus, a MongoDB for Startups program member, is a software platform that enables enterprises to collect, store, report, and act on their environmental, social, and governance data. ESG data includes things like:

  • How a company safeguards the environment
  • Its energy consumption and how it impacts climate change
  • How it manages relationships with employees, suppliers, and customers
  • Details about the company’s leadership, executive pay, audits, and internal controls

The Hydrus platform enables organizations to collect, store, and audit diversity and environmental data, and run analytics and machine learning against that data.

Hydrus offers users a first-rate UI/UX so that even non-technical users can leverage the platform. With the auditing capabilities, organizations can ensure the provenance and integrity of ESG data over time. Other solutions don't allow users to go back in time and determine who made changes to the data, why they made them, what earlier versions of the data looked like, and what time the changes were made. Hydrus gives users complete visibility into these activities.

The tech stack

MongoDB Atlas was the preferred database for Hydrus because of the flexibility of the data model. George Lee, founder and CEO of Hydrus, says the traditional SQL database model was too limiting for the startup's needs. MongoDB's document model eliminated the need to create tables or enforce restrictions of data fields. With MongoDB, they could simply add fields without undertaking any major schema changes.

Hydrus also tapped MongoDB for access to engineers and technical resources. This enabled the company to architect its platform for all of the different types of sustainability data that exist. MongoDB technical experts helped Hydrus model data for future scalability and flexibility so it could add data fields when the need arises.

On top of Atlas and MongoDB technical support, Hydrus leans heavily on MongoDB Charts, a data visualization tool for creating, sharing, and embedding visualizations from MongoDB Atlas. Charts enables Hydrus to derive insights from ESG data, giving its Fortune 200 clients better visibility into their operational efficiency. Charts uses a drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy to build charts and answer questions about ESG data.

A Hydrus customer using MongoDB Charts was better able to understand the impact of their footprint from a greenhouse gas perspective and a resource usage perspective. Another customer detected a 30x increase in refrigerant usage in one of its facilities. The visual analytics generated with MongoDB Charts enabled the company to make changes to improve their ESG performance.

MongoDB Charts enabled Hydrus to visualize sustainability data

"MongoDB Charts enables our customers to directly report their sustainability data, customize the charts, and better tell the sustainability story in a visual format," Lee says. "It's way better than the traditional format where you have data, tables, and spreadsheets everywhere."

The roadmap

Hydrus seeks to take the hassle out of managing a sustainable business by streamlining data collection, reporting, and auditing processes. Its platform is designed to eliminate manual tasks for sustainability managers so they can focus on decarbonization, resource usage optimization, and being able to hit their sustainability goals. Hydrus accelerates these activities by helping companies model their sustainability data around science-based targets so they can better decarbonize and meet other ESG goals.

If you're interested in learning more about how to help your organization become more sustainable, decarbonize, and succeed in your sustainability journey, visit the Hydrus website.

Are you part of a startup and interested in joining the MongoDB for Startups program? Apply now.

For more startup content, check out our wrap-up of the 2022 year in startups.

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Predictions 2023: Modernization Efforts in the Financial Services Industry

As a global recession looms, banks are facing tough economic conditions in 2023. Lowering costs will be vital for many organizations to remain competitive in a data-intensive and highly regulated environment. Thus, it’s important that any IT investments accelerate digital transformation with innovative technologies that break down data silos, increase operational efficiency, and build personalized customer experiences. Read on to learn about areas in which banks are looking to modernize in 2023 to build better customer experiences at a lower cost and at scale. Shaping a better banking future with composable designs With banks eager to modernize and innovate, institutions must move away from the legacy systems that are restricting their ability to show progress. Placing consumers at the center of a banking experience made up of interconnected, yet independent services offers technology-forward banks the chance to reshape their business models and subsequently grow market share and increase profitability. These opportunities have brought to fruition a composable architecture design allows faster innovation, improved operational efficiency, and creates new revenue streams by extending the portfolio of services and products. Thus, banks are able to adopt the best-of-breed and perfect-fit-for-purpose software available by orchestrating strategic partnerships with relevant fintechs and software providers. This new breed of suppliers can provide everything from know your customer (KYC) services to integrated booking, load services or basic marketing and portfolio management functionalities. This approach is more cost efficient for institutions than having to build and maintain the infrastructure themselves, and it is significantly faster in terms of time to market and time to revenue. Banks adopting such an approach are seeing fintechs less as competitors and more as part of an ecosystem to collaborate with to accelerate innovation and reach customers. Operational efficiency with intelligent automation Financial institutions will continue to focus on operational efficiency and cost control through automating previous manual and paper-driven processes. Banks have made some progress digitizing and automating what were once almost exclusively paper-based, manual processes. But, the primary driver of this transformation has been compliance with local regulations rather than an overarching strategy for really getting to know the client and achieving true customer delight. The market is eager for better automated and data-driven decisions, and legacy systems can’t keep up. Creating hyper-personalized experiences that customers demand, which include things like chatbots, self-service portals, and digital forensics, is difficult for institutions using outdated technology. And, having data infrastructure in siloes prohibits any truly integrated modern experience. Using a combination of robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI), financial institutions are able to streamline processes, thereby freeing the workforce to focus on tasks that drive a bigger impact for the customer and business. Institutions must not digitize without considering the human interaction that will be replaced, as customers prefer a hybrid approach. The ability to act on real-time data is the way forward for driving value and transforming customer experiences, which must be accompanied by the modernization of the underlying data architecture. The prerequisite for this goal involves the de-siloing of data and sources into a holistic data landscape. Some people call it a data mesh , some composable data sources, virtualized data. Solving ESG data challenges Along with high inflation, the cost-of-living crisis, energy turmoil, and rising interest rates, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is also in the spotlight. There is growing pressure from regulators to provide ESG data and from investors to make sure portfolios are sustainable. The role of ESG data in conducting market analysis, supporting asset allocation and risk management, and providing insights into the long-term sustainability of investments continues to expand. The nature and variability of many ESG metrics is a major challenge facing companies today. Unlike financial datasets that are mostly numerical, ESG metrics can include both quantitative and qualitative data to help investors and other stakeholders understand a company’s actions and intentions. This complexity, coupled with the lack of a universally applicable ESG reporting standard, means institutions must consider different standards with different data requirements. To master ESG reporting, including the integration of relevant KPIs, appropriate, high-quality data is needed that is also at the right level of granularity and covers the required industries and region. Given the data volume and complexity, financial institutions are building ESG platforms underpinned by modern data platforms that are capable of consolidating different types of data from various providers, creating customized views, modeling data, and performing operations with no barriers. Digital payments - Unlocking an enriched experience Pushed by new technologies and global trends, the digital payments market is flourishing globally. With a valuation of more than $68 billion in 2021 and expectations of double-digit growth over the next decade, emerging markets are leading the way in terms of relative expansion. This growth has been driven by pandemic-induced cashless payments, e-commerce, government push, and fintechs. Digital payments are transforming the payments experience. While it was once enough for payment service providers to supply account information and orchestrate simple transactions, consumers now expect an enriched experience where each transaction offers new insights and value-added services. Meeting these expectations is difficult, especially for companies that rely on outdated technologies that were created long before transactions were carried out with a few taps on a mobile device. To meet the needs of customers, financial institutions are modernizing their payments data infrastructure to create personalized, secure, and real-time payment experiences — all while protecting consumers from fraud. This modernization allows financial institutions to ingest any type of data, launch services more quickly at a lower cost, and have the freedom to run in any environment, from on-premises to multi-cloud . Security and risk management Data is critical to every financial institution; it is recognized as a core asset to drive customer growth and innovation. As the need to leverage data efficiently increases, however, according to 57% of decision makers , the legacy technology that still underpins many organizations is too expensive and doesn’t fulfill the requirements of modern applications. Not only is this legacy infrastructure complex, it is unable to meet current security requirements. Given the huge amount of confidential client and customer data that the financial services industry deals with on a daily basis — and the strict regulations surrounding that data — security must be of highest priority. The perceived value of this data also makes financial services organizations a primary target for data breaches. Fraud protection, risk management, and anti-money laundering are high priorities for any new data platform according to Forrester’s What’s Driving Next-Generation Data Platform Adoption in Financial Services study. To meet these challenges, adoption of next-generation data platforms will continue to grow as financial institutions realize their full potential to manage costs, maximize security, and foster innovation. Download Forrester’s full study — What’s Driving Next-Generation Data Platform Adoption in Financial Services — to learn more.

January 17, 2023
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MongoDB Atlas Integration with Ably Unlocks Real-time Capabilities

Enterprises across sectors increasingly realize that data, like time, doesn’t wait. Indeed, harnessing and synchronizing information in real time is the new currency of business agility. Enter the alliance between MongoDB and Ably—a partnership that has led to Ably's new database connector for MongoDB Atlas . The new database connector provides a robust framework for businesses to create real-time, data-intensive applications that can provide top-notch user experiences thanks to an opinionated client SDK to be used on top of LiveSync, ensuring both data integrity and real-time consistency—without compromising your existing tech stack. The synergy of MongoDB Atlas and Ably LiveSync This new MongoDB Atlas-Ably integration tackles a fundamental challenge in modern application architecture: maintaining data consistency across distributed systems in real-time. MongoDB Atlas serves as the foundation—a flexible, scalable database service that adapts to the ebb and flow of data demands. Meanwhile, Ably LiveSync acts as the nervous system, ensuring that every change, every update, resonates instantly across the entire application ecosystem. The Ably LiveSync database connector for MongoDB Atlas offers a transformative approach to real-time data management, combining unparalleled scalability with seamless synchronization. This solution effortlessly adapts to growing data volumes and expanding user bases, catering to businesses of all sizes—from agile startups to established enterprises. By rapidly conveying database changes to end-users, it ensures that all stakeholders operate from a single, up-to-date source of truth, fostering data consistency across the entire organization. At its core, LiveSync is built with robust resilience in mind, featuring built-in failover mechanisms and connection recovery capabilities. This architecture provides businesses with the high availability they need to maintain continuous operations in today's always-on digital landscape. Moreover, by abstracting away the complexities of real-time infrastructure, LiveSync empowers developers to focus on creating features that drive business value. This focus on developer productivity, combined with its scalability and reliability, positions Ably LiveSync for MongoDB Atlas as a cornerstone technology for companies aiming to harness the power of real-time data synchronization. Figure 1: Ably real-time integration with MongoDB Atlas. Industry transformation: A real-time revolution This new integration has a number of implications across various sectors. For example, in the banking and financial services sector , the MongoDB Atlas-Ably integration enables instantaneous fraud detection systems that can promptly react to potential threats. Live trading platforms benefit as well, seamlessly updating to reflect every market change as it happens. Banking applications are equally enhanced, with real-time updating of account balances and transactions, ensuring that users always have access to the most recent financial information. In the retail industry , meanwhile, the integration facilitates real-time inventory management across both physical and online stores, ensuring that supply matches demand at all times. This capability supports dynamic pricing strategies that can adapt instantly to fluctuations in consumer interest, and it powers personalized shopping experiences with live product recommendations tailored to individual customer preferences. Manufacturing and mobility sectors also see transformative benefits. With the capability for real-time monitoring of production lines, businesses can implement just-in-time manufacturing processes, streamlining operations and reducing waste. Real-time tracking of vehicles and assets enhances logistics efficiency, while predictive maintenance systems provide foresight into potential equipment failures, allowing for timely interventions. The healthcare sector stands to gain significantly from this technology. Real-time patient monitoring systems offer healthcare providers immediate alerts, ensuring swift medical responses when necessary. Electronic health records receive seamless updates across multiple care settings, promoting coherent patient care. Efficient resource allocation is achieved through live tracking of hospital beds and equipment, optimizing hospital operations. Insurance companies are not left out of this technological leap. The integration allows for dynamic risk assessment and pricing models that adapt in real-time, refining accuracy and responsiveness. Instant claim processing and status updates enhance customer satisfaction, while live tracking of insured assets facilitates more accurate underwriting and expedites the resolution of claims. Finally, in telecommunications and media this integration promises buffer-free content delivery and streaming services, vastly improving the end-user experience. real-time network performance monitoring enables proactive issue resolution, maintaining service quality. Users can enjoy synchronized experiences across multiple devices and platforms, fostering seamless interaction with digital content. Today's business imperative As industries continue to evolve at a rapid pace, the integration of MongoDB Atlas and Ably LiveSync provides a compelling way for businesses to not only keep up but lead the real-time revolution. For IT decision-makers looking to put their organizations at the forefront of innovation, this integration turns static data into a dynamic driver of business growth and market leadership. Access MongoDB Atlas and Ably LiveSync Resources and start your journey towards real-time innovation today. Learn more about how MongoDB Atlas can power industry-specific solutions .

December 18, 2024