As the global sustainability movement accelerates and international regulatory standards continue to evolve, sustainability information has moved beyond corporate image-building and disclosure to become a critical component of investment decisions, credit assessments, and corporate valuation. With international sustainability disclosure standards such as the TCFD, IFRS S1, and IFRS S2 increasingly becoming benchmarks for corporate reporting, ensuring the completeness, credibility, and comparability of sustainability-related financial information has become a critical transformation challenge for regulators, financial institutions, investors, and corporations alike.
Recognizing the lack of intelligent tools in the market capable of truly understanding the unstructured and semantically complex content of sustainability reports and conducting objective assessments, NCCU’s Center for Business Sustainability, in collaboration with the Research Center for Sustainable Financial Decision-Making at NCCU Business School, held the launch event for the Sustainability Financial Reporting Intelligent Interpretation System (SustainFRE) on September 11, 2026, at the Public and Business Administration Education Center. The event officially introduced SustainFRE, a pioneering system in Taiwan designed to intelligently interpret sustainability financial disclosures.
SustainFRE represents not only a breakthrough in Taiwan’s sustainability fintech research and development, but also marks a new stage in sustainability information disclosure—one that is increasingly analyzable, quantifiable, comparable, and decision-oriented through artificial intelligence (AI).
Cross-Disciplinary Innovation Addresses the Challenges of Traditional Chinese Sustainability Reporting
The system was jointly developed by a research team led by Professor Yen-Ju Chen, Director of the Research Center for Sustainable Financial Decision-Making, Executive Director of the EMBA Program, and Professor of Finance at NCCU Business School; Associate Professor Chia-Hsiang Weng of the Department of Accounting; and Associate Professor Yi-Ling Lin of the Department of Management Information Systems.
The research team identified significant limitations in existing technologies, which often rely on traditional keyword matching and basic classification models. Such approaches struggle to accurately interpret the semantic context, cultural nuances, and regulatory language of increasingly extensive and complex sustainability reports. These challenges are particularly pronounced in Traditional Chinese-language applications.
After years of research and iterative development, the team successfully integrated expertise from sustainable finance, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing (NLP). SustainFRE combines information retrieval, semantic analysis, and large language model (LLM) reasoning technologies with a rigorous knowledge base of sustainability disclosure standards to establish a new intelligent interpretation and analytical framework.
The system can automatically evaluate the quality of corporate sustainability-related disclosures and generate objective, consistent, and highly quantifiable analytical results. By doing so, it addresses the subjectivity and substantial human effort traditionally involved in interpreting sustainability disclosures.
Academia and Industry Join Forces to Strengthen Taiwan’s Sustainable Finance Competitiveness
The launch event brought together distinguished guests from academia and industry, including NCCU Business School Dean Chia-Chi Huang, Professor Annie Wu, Professor Danchi Tan, CPA Chih-Chung Chen of Ernst & Young Taiwan, and Yang-Chun Chuang, Deputy Executive Director of the Sustainability Department at Chroma ATE Inc., who shared their perspectives and witnessed the launch of the system.
At the event, Professor Yen-Ju Chen emphasized that the system represents not only the practical application of academic research, but also an effort to establish internationally competitive sustainability information infrastructure for Taiwan. By integrating AI into sustainability disclosure processes, SustainFRE can help companies significantly improve the quality of their disclosures, enhance the efficiency of third-party assurance, and support financial institutions in making more accurate and resilient decisions related to sustainable lending and green investment.
Driving Industry Transformation Toward Intelligent Sustainability Governance
NCCU has long been committed to business education and forward-looking research. By applying AI to address information overload and challenges in professional interpretation within ESG disclosure processes, this initiative successfully bridges academic research capabilities with real-world business needs. During the panel discussion, participating guests and corporate representatives engaged in active exchanges and recognized the significant potential of the system to enhance the transparency and effectiveness of ESG governance.
The launch of SustainFRE demonstrates NCCU’s strong research capabilities in green finance while providing Taiwanese companies with a powerful decision-support tool amid the dual transformation of digitalization and sustainability.
As global expectations for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance continue to rise, SustainFRE is expected to help companies navigate increasingly complex climate-related and regulatory environments, continuously assess and improve their sustainability disclosures, and move more steadily toward the 2050 net-zero target.
The system marks an important milestone in advancing intelligent sustainability governance and sustainable finance in Taiwan, opening a new chapter in the integration of AI, sustainability, and financial decision-making.