Category: Uncategorized

We’re PSEG Proud to be named one of America’s most JUST companies and to be included in the 2025 JUST 100 list by JUST Capital. We’re honored to be recognized for our work serving our customers, employees, communities, the environment and shareholders.

View original content here.

Mastercard

Starting on January 7, a series of ferocious wildfires erupted in the Los Angeles area, burning more than 40,000 acres and causing roughly $14.8 billion in damages. Within a month, two teams of specially trained Mastercard employees hit the ground to support the American Red Cross’s relief efforts, serving thousands of people from all walks of life whose homes and businesses had been reduced to smoking rubble.

“We all have stories to share, and they are what drive us every day,” says Deann Donohue, an O’Fallon, Missouri-based vice president in the company’s Public Sector Center of Excellence who deployed with the first team of volunteers. “It’s providing supplies to the husband whose wife passed the year before who is hoping to find her urn. It’s listening to the fire brigade medic whose parents called him to say news reporters were standing in front of his place as it was burning down.”

Mastercard launched its disaster relief corps with the American Red Cross in 2019, with 53 employees trained in all aspects of aid distribution, disaster assessment and shelter operations. Today, Mastercard has 687 employees ready to help, some of whom have deployed multiple times, including to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina last year, Hurricane Ian in Florida in 2022 and the western Kentucky tornadoes in 2021.

In the deployment’s spare moments, Donohue and Joe Kaczorowski, a senior vice president for Risk Analytics based in Purchase, New York, shared dispatches from their time in Los Angeles.

Day 1: Getting the assignment

It’s a stark 2 a.m. wake-up for the Purchase-based volunteers, including Kaczorowski, to make the flight out to Los Angeles. A group of 20 volunteers from different offices across the U.S. are doing the same for this first deployment; another dozen employees will fly out next week to relieve them.

Upon arrival, the volunteers join the Red Cross disaster response operation’s stand-up meeting to hear the game plan for the week ahead. “I’ve already received comments about how they like the energy and collaboration we bring to the mission,” Kaczorowski writes. “So it’s exciting to feel welcomed here.”  

At the hotel, it’s bittersweet to meet new volunteers and see familiar faces from both Red Cross and Mastercard offices. Some of these same volunteers were from the Hurricane Helene response in western North Carolina last fall.

“I remember from my very first deployment resettling Afghan refugees in Texas that a woman told me that people talk about time differently in the Red Cross,” Kaczorowski writes. “It’s not, ‘How many years have you been involved?’ It’s ‘How many deployments have you done?’ It’s really inspiring to see the shift in the concept of time within our own Mastercard team with so many having done multiple deployments now.”

Day 2: On the ground

With more than four active fires, the recovery work scatters volunteers across the county.

Donohue is stationed at UCLA Research Center close to the Palisades Fire, where FEMA and other organizations are offering services ranging from temporary housing to mental health care to help reprinting Social Security cards and birth certificates.

Across the city, Kaczorowski is stationed at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium shelter, which is serving as a Red Cross sanctuary for those in need. The Mastercard team is focused on consolidating residents from multiple ballrooms into a single ballroom to make operations more efficient and ensure an accurate count of shelter residents. That means trying to find those assigned to the cots and, if they’ve already found a new place to move, formally checking them out of the shelter, bagging what is left behind and storing the items in case they return for them.

The enormous ballroom serving as the infirmary also is emptying out, requiring another consolidation. “This involved everything from moving crates of belongings, to wheeling people in hospital beds to the new location and helping them set things up in the new room,” Kaczorowski writes. “Overall, once we got going, there was very little down time.”

Day 3: A heavy heart

Today, Donohue is at an Altadena grocery store, one of the only buildings left standing in the community. She is handing out PPE kits for those re-entering their neighborhood. “It was emotionally harder today; most residents were going back to just ashes but were looking for anything left,” she writes.

Kaczorowski is taking on a new role at a new station in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and spends the day using his Mastercard expertise to help with data and reporting, tracking volunteer assignments and rental cars for the Red Cross. “We talked about challenges, and I even got to see how they thoughtfully handled interactions with distraught clients who came to talk to them.”    

Days 4 and 5: Lifted spirits

Donohue is back in Pacific Palisades, and it’s the city’s first rainy day since the fires started. She spends the day at the Palisades Recreation Center, a brick building left standing in the middle of ashes, where she meets a couple who grew up in her neighborhood back in St. Louis. “We laughed and cried together — she said it was one of the first times being back that she was able to smile, and it truly touched me.”

Kaczorowski goes back to consolidating shelter spaces that had started to clear out when the day is happily interrupted by the arrival of rock icon Neil Young, who has arrived to play “Heart of Gold,” uplifting the shelter one string at a time, and his wife, actress Daryl Hannah, who brings along two miniature horses. “Everywhere I look,” Kaczorowski writes, “I see our team doing little things all over to create comfort and build bonds — both within the team, but especially with the residents.”

Day 6 – The first deployment ends, but the impact is lasting

As a new team of Mastercard employees makes its way to California, the first team’s members are wrapping up their last deployment day, reflecting on their time.

Donohue is reminded why she volunteers: “As I spend the week listening and being present for those impacted, I’ve realized just how important the Red Cross and their volunteers are. It’s helping the brother-in-law of a man with dementia who drove in from out of state to start paperwork for resources, and giving water and hugging the couple looking to see if their daughter’s grave was still standing around the corner. It’s about supporting each other in times of need.”

Similarly, Kaczorowski is overwhelmed with appreciation for having the opportunity to give back. “Volunteering with disaster relief is not for the faint of heart — but the reward for me was more than worth every minute. I met so many amazing people, from all walks of life, all over the U.S. and all with one purpose and passion — to give back. We will be bonded for life, and I can’t wait to serve with them all again.”

Originally published by Mastercard

Follow along Mastercard’s journey to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the world by storm, and for good reason. AI can help automate mundane tasks, improve operational efficiency and enhance human decision-making. 

Some of its benefits extend to investing as well. We believe that powerful AI tools such as natural language processing (NLP) may help active managers deliver better investment outcomes by alerting them to negative environmental, social and governance (ESG) news before it becomes widely disseminated.

The Fallout When Bad News Breaks 

From environmental disasters like oil spills and chemical leaks to social issues such as child labor to governance failures like executive misconduct, negative ESG news can severely damage a company’s reputation, erode investor confidence and undermine financial performance. 

Our research indicates that, while positive ESG news has quickly boosted company returns, negative ESG has done just the opposite. Companies with negative ESG events have underperformed their peers—not just on the first day the news broke, but for weeks after (Display). For stocks associated with negative ESG news, returns over the 10-day holding period shown annualize to –7.3% in excess return (–1.2% for fixed income); for stocks associated with positive ESG news, returns over the 10-day holding period shown annualize to 6.2% in excess return (0.2% for fixed income).

Natural Language Processing Changes the Game

Clearly, if asset managers could uncover ESG-related controversies faster than their peers, they’d have an investment edge. But that’s easier said than done. Manually sifting through mountains of corporate filings and news articles is not just cumbersome and time-consuming; it’s also a Sisyphean task that must be repeated daily. 

That’s where NLP technology comes in. 

NLP is a field of AI that enables algorithms to understand, interpret and generate human communication. NLP applications have evolved dramatically since their advent in the 1950s, progressing from simple pattern matching—such as recognizing the phrase “thank you” and responding with “you’re welcome,” or counting the number of occurrences of a given word in a text—to more sophisticated techniques that involve deep learning and contextual understanding. 

The result is a technology that is highly accurate and nuanced in its understanding and generation of human language, with the power to process and analyze vast amounts of raw data quickly and efficiently.

Putting NLP to Work: Controversy Alerts

We’ve built a powerful NLP tool that serves as a complement to our fundamental analysis. Incorporating the latest large-language models, this tool transforms the daunting task of sifting through thousands of company and news reports into an efficient and insightful process that flags potentially material ESG issues in real time. 

Our tool monitors companies around the world, screening global news in multiple languages for controversies across a wide range of topics, including modern slavery, child labor, discrimination, tax scandals, executive pay and corruption. Furthermore, the tool is scalable, screening for developing ESG controversies across hundreds of companies simultaneously and providing timely alerts before negative news impacts the market. 

It understands financial jargon, is trained in ESG-specific knowledge, and can assess tone and context, with the goal of evaluating the sentiment around a particular ESG news item with respect to a specific company. The tool extracts relevant information from the news sources, creates a summary and highlights what it deems most important for our analysts to evaluate. And it includes links to the original articles, allowing analysts to verify the information quickly. 

For example, our NLP tool flagged a large mining concern with operations in Central America, alerting us to alleged poor treatment of employees and community members that compelled local governments to file lawsuits. Eventually, the company’s local mining permits were pulled, and it had to abandon operations in the area after investing nearly US$10 billion in the project. Fortunately, our tool had alerted us to these risks ahead of the government’s punitive actions.

The Bigger Picture: Integrating Our NLP Tool

Of course, AI and other tools are no substitute for sound fundamental analysis, which is why negative ESG news alerts don’t necessarily keep us from taking a position. The news may represent headline risk with which we’re comfortable or that we find is already priced into valuations. 

As always, it’s up to our investment teams to assemble relevant data, including NLP alerts, into a bigger picture. Ultimately, our NLP tool is just one resource—albeit a valuable one—within a broader fundamental analysis that helps us make an informed decision about a company. 

What’s more, NLP allows our analysts and portfolio managers to devote less time to tracking down data and more time to thinking critically about it—and to putting it to use on behalf of our clients.

References to specific securities discussed are not to be considered recommendations by AllianceBernstein L.P.

The views expressed herein do not constitute research, investment advice or trade recommendations, and do not necessarily represent the views of all AB portfolio-management teams and are subject to change over time.

Learn more about AB’s approach to responsibility here.