Erik's manual scraping process

I (Tim) wrote these (mostly chronological) notes as Erik was showcasing his process.

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BankTrack bank profiles

• Visit banktrack bank profile. ie. banktrack.org/bank/bank_of_america
• Policies tab (below about)
• Investment policies are all listed
  • also occur in Documents tab - policies are often in documents
  • Policies are added here (in documents), tagged as 'csr policy'
  • When an old one is obsolete, it is tagged as 'out of date'
  • Also added to BT share (a virtual harddrive)

Searching and updating the profiles:

• Bank of America

  • 60-70% Investment policies link to a CSR web page
    • otherwise 'unavailable' will be stated
  • Clicks on link (BoA)
  • CSR framework available as PDF (mostly PDF, sometimes word, sometimes html)
    • already tracked
  • using google site search
    • google: human rights site:bankofamerica.com
    • finds pdf document, downloads to get document date
  • google: policy site:bankofamerica.com
    • ...

• ANZ

  • clicks link in BankTrack investment profile
  • finds list of policy links
  • clicks all PDFs, finds dates
  • finds updated Energy policy
  • downloads to BT share
  • adds to banktrack website
  • marks old energy policy as 'outdated'
  • google: human rights site:anz.com

• Bank of China

  • clicks on link from investment profile
  • ! link not found
  • goes to bank website itself, linked from BankTrack - english version
  • Clicks About us
  • scrolls, finds nothing new
  • Clicks on Investor relations
  • 'they probably don't have any policies, and the ones listed are from the subsidiary' - Bank of China Hong Kong
  • google: policy site:boc.cn - nothing first page, doesn't check second
  • google: sustainability site:boc.cn - nothing first page, doesn't check second

Erik has local contacts in China to check local sites

• but they didn't appear to have linked anything for the bank of China

• CaixaBank

• clicks on BT link

• principles linking to document already logged

Bank Policies

• BT website divided into 'banks and climate', etc.
• Banks are scored on scale on which you can get points
• output of our tool would be reviewed by ie. climate team

'I do site search when desperate'

• usually when no information found easily
• when bank website is not well-structured and informed about policies

What do you do when that link in investment profile doesn't exist?

• Answer: site search Are document origins (URLs) stored?
• Answer: no, documents are downloaded to BT share
• in case document is HTML, link to the page You say "sometimes I do this" - there is no protocol?
• Answer: not really, intuition is built, but search is not exhaustive