Luxembourg Finance Awards 2021: and the winners are…

InFinance organised its first event of the year on March 18th, 2021, in a phygital setting. The event featured local and European speakers who shared their best practices and discussed the topical issues of sustainability and ESG. After an insightful conference session, the traditional Luxembourg Finance Awards ceremony took place.

The “Fintech Solution of the Year” award went to Telindus for its DigitalKYT solution, which enables the ongoing detection and reporting on financial crime activity using AI, while ensuring that legitimate transactions are processed normally. As highlighted by Telindus, “it represents the next-generation of detection engines and beholds the following benefits for Financial Institutions: it increases detection to new levels, enables informed decision-taking as context prioritizes investigations based on impact, enhances effectiveness of compliance through detection quality and resolution speed, etc.”

The Luxembourg Stock Exchange won the ”Best Green and Sustainable Initiative” award. The jury members notably highlighted that through Luxembourg Green Exchange (LGX), the world’s leading platform for sustainable securities, LuxSE has been at the forefront of sustainable finance since the market’s inception. It launched several initiatives, namely the LGX Academy (tailor-made courses on a broad range of topics linked to sustainable finance), LGX Data Hub (which collects and structures sustainability data points through a process supported by AI algorithms) and the Solactive LGX Green Bond Impact Index.

The price of “Outstanding Contribution to the Luxembourg Financial Center” was awarded to Luxembourg for Finance, for its new flagship international campaign entitled “Ambitions 2025: Financing a sustainable future”. The campaign lays out the 5-year vision for Luxembourg’s financial center up to 2025. This vision acts as a roadmap to enable Luxembourg to help finance a globally sustainable future by putting qualitative growth, innovation and stability at the core of its activities.

Odile Brandstetter (Vice President Treasury at Majorel (a Bertelsmann & Saham Groups company)) was then named “Treasury Manager of the Year”. Mrs Brandstetter started alone in an international multinational company with the challenging objective of setting up a full treasury function from scratch and today still continues to develop the role and the department, notably by implementing innovative IT treasury tools. This price is supported by ATEL.

Finally, Julie Becker (Deputy CEO, Luxembourg Stock Exchange, and LuxSE’s soon-to-be CEO, from April 2021) was named “Inspirational Woman in Finance”. She adds: “2020 was a year of great innovation at LGX. Under my leadership, LuxSE set out to address some of the main hurdles to the growth of sustainable finance, namely the lack of adequate financial education and access to structured data. We decided to close the gap and after months of work involving many different teams at our exchange, we were ready to establish the LGX universe”.

This year, a specific prize was also given to Greenomy who were selected as winners of the Fintech European Discovery Programme. They provide digital tools to help companies measure and improve their sustainability level. They won a 2-day booth at ICT Spring, the Luxembourg-based global tech conference taking place next September 14-15, 2021. 

The organizers would like to thanks  the sponsors and partners of the 2021 edition of EFS: Luxembourg For Finance, Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce, ABBL, LHoFT, Fidelity International, Amindis, 2° Investing Initiative, Natixis, Ossiam, Thematics AM, Finologee, Sogelife, Finance For Tomorrow, LuxFLAG, The Banking Scene, Family Office Magazine, LAWM, Executive Global, Amcham Luxembourg, SmartMoneyMatch.