Allianz Commercial oversees underwriting for a highly diversified global client base, including a vast ecosystem of large and medium-sized enterprises and infrastructure projects.

To enhance visibility into underwriting risks at scale, Allianz Commercial partnered with SESAMm to implement an automated sustainability and reputational risk due diligence capability directly integrated into underwriting workflows. SESAMm now automates the assessment of hundreds of thousands of companies each year, delivering structured insights on sustainability and reputational risk in seconds via a real-time API-driven workflow.

This deployment functions as a fully integrated component of daily underwriting activities across global teams, supporting high-volume decision-making processes without adding operational burden.

Key Benefits at a Glance

• Efficiency: Transformed a manual, multi-step process into a fully automated, real-time underwriting check delivered in seconds.
• Going Beyond Data: Automatically completes the sustainability and reputational due diligence questionnaire rather than simply delivering raw risk event data, saving time and enabling faster referral decisions.
• Dedicated Corporate and Infrastructure Projects Coverage: Comprehensive global coverage across corporate coverage and infrastructure projects.
• Tailored Approach: Risk logic configured to Allianz Commercial’s underwriting policies and decision frameworks, delivering assessments tailored to its specific requirements rather than requiring adaptation to an off-the-shelf product.

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Underwriting teams had sustainability and reputational risk data for large listed companies from an existing data provider, but required broader coverage across SMEs and privately held companies. To fill this gap, underwriting teams relied on a combination of internal processes and external research to identify potential risks. As volumes increased, ensuring consistent and timely access to sustainability impacts became a key challenge, particularly during onboarding and renewal cycles.

As part of this process, SESAMm delivered significant additional value by providing direct answers to each sustainability and reputation due diligence questionnaire question in a systematic way, enabling Allianz Commercial to fully automate the process, which was not feasible with other solutions.

Allianz Commercial aimed to:  

• Provide underwriters with immediate access to structured risk data.
• Align with internal sustainability and reputational risk guidelines.  
• Support efficient onboarding and renewal workflows at high volumes.

Allianz Commercial needed a solution that could deliver real-time, standardized, and scalable risk insights directly within underwriters’ workflows.

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SESAMm partnered with Allianz Commercial to deploy a fully integrated risk intelligence layer embedded within its proprietary underwriting environment. Underwriters now access SESAMm insights directly within their existing interface.

When underwriters enter a company identifier, the system uses Dun & Bradstreet’s D‑U‑N‑S® Number to anchor the search in a globally recognized, trusted, and data‑rich company record. With that foundation, the SESAMm API can instantly retrieve and deliver a structured sustainability and reputational risk assessment, supporting both precise entity matching and scalable discovery across millions of companies.

The SESAMm API evaluates external data over a multi-year period and automatically answers predefined due diligence questions across sustainability and reputational risk categories. Each response includes:

• Clear yes/no determinations
• Supporting justification and context
• Supporting evidence, compliant with Allianz Commercial audit track requirements

The output is aligned with internal reputational risk and sustainability guidelines and supports transparent, auditable underwriting decisions without adding operational complexity.

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Since deployment, SESAMm has enabled Allianz Commercial to evaluate corporate coverage  and infrastructure projects underwriting with consistent, real-time external risk intelligence. A process that previously required multiple research and validation steps can now be completed in under a minute through automated API-driven checks embedded directly within underwriting workflows.

The solution supports the assessment of hundreds of thousands of companies annually for Allianz Commercial and provides underwriters with documented sustainability and reputational risk insights at the point of decision. With expanded visibility across privately held and smaller companies globally, Allianz Commercial benefits from a far more consistent risk coverage while maintaining the speed and reliability required for high-volume onboarding and renewal processes across global operations.

Infrastructure sits at the center of the energy transition, and it's also one of the sectors most exposed to ESG controversy, from community displacement and water pollution to safety failures and corruption. As LPs, lenders, and regulators sharpen their scrutiny, knowing where that risk concentrates and how it evolves has become essential to due diligence and portfolio monitoring alike.

This whitepaper draws on SESAMm's analysis of over 250,000 infrastructure projects worldwide between 2021 and 2026, built on our natural language processing engine's coverage of millions of news, NGO, and regulatory sources.

It covers which project types carry the highest ESG risk, which pillar (Environmental, Social, or Governance) dominates the narrative, what drives spikes in governance controversy, and how two contrasting case studies, the Turów and Cerrejón coal mines, show just how differently a controversy can play out over time.

People are leaving traditional jobs in droves according to the latest figures from the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed a record breaking 4.5 Million resignations as of Nov 2021.

The trend has originated a movement on Reddit similar to r/wallstreetbets called r/antiwork where more than 1.7 Million active members share resignation stories, discuss unfair work practices, criticize their bosses, and advocate for employee rights and better work conditions.

We applied SESAMm’s AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine TextReveal® to analyze r/antiwork subreddit thread posts, as well as other related content, from a context and sentiment analysis perspective.

The full report, entitled “The Big Quit”, is one of our series of Alternative Data Trends, which leverages web data and AI to provide regular analytics on key industries and subjects. They typically contain alternative data based insights and analyses, including numerous detailed charts and graphs as well as supporting data which can be reprocessed by client teams.

Here are some of The Big Quit report’s highlights:

• Mentions of the Anti-Work movement exploded by 215% in June 2021 coinciding with the start of the ‘Great Resignation’.
• Leisure & Hospitality, Healthcare and Retail are the three most mentioned sectors.
• McDonalds and Starbucks are the two companies with the highest number of mentions.
• The three brands displaying the most negative sentiment are Wendy’s, Chipotle Mexican Grill and McDonald’s.
• The three most talked about topics are compensation benefits, and workload.
• The Debtstrike movement, seeking debt relief for the less fortunate in society as well as banning unfair debt practices, saw mentions shoot up 497% in September 2021.

Volume of Mentions of “Anti-work” as a predictive Indicator of The Big Quit

The graph above shows that prior to August 2021, anti-work mentions on Reddit have been fairly stable before this topic went viral with a 215% increase, this growth of mentions appears to be a leading indicator to the 4.5 million resignations in November 2021.

SESAMm’s TextReveal® platform can be used in a wide variety of use cases and projects. Request a copy of the full Alternative Data Trends report “The Big Quit” report here, or if you have any other questions regarding our data, or would like a demo, please contact info@sesamm.com.