Case Study: The International Finance Corporation (IFC) accelerates ESG risk analysis and sustainable investing with Databricks

Advancing sustainable investment in emerging markets

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) needed a scalable way to analyze ESG risk across vast amounts of unstructured data as it worked to support sustainable investment in emerging markets. Using its AI-powered MALENA ESG analytics platform, IFC wanted to improve productivity, extract insights faster, and build confidence in investment decisions with help from Databricks.

With the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, IFC scaled MALENA on a lakehouse architecture that connected with Azure Data Lake, enabled GPU computing, and supported machine learning and data engineering workflows. Databricks helped IFC process hundreds of thousands of documents and millions of lines of text, develop sentiment and entity recognition models, build 10,000 company profiles, and expand insights across more than 180 markets, while also improving model monitoring and enabling plans for real-time model serving.

The International Finance Corporation

Laura McCanlies

Chief Information Officer