ESG Investor’s weekly round-up of news on technology and tools in the sustainable investing sector.
Market data provider Refinitiv is set to partner with US business magazine Fortune in a new standard for corporate diversity and inclusion (D&I) disclosure. Designed to aid companies in tackling the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in corporate workplaces, Fortune’s Measure Up Initiative in powered by Refinitiv’s ESG market data. It is expected that the partnership will establish diversity disclosure and accountability as a metric for stakeholder-driven businesses. Fortune will also launch a new D&I filter, allowing companies on the 2021 Fortune 500 list to be sorted and ranked using self-reported data provided by Refinitiv. This data will also identify the 2021 Most Progressive Companies in Racial Inclusion.
A new Asia ex-Japan ESG index suite has been launched by Bloomberg and MSCI. The Bloomberg Barclays MSCI Emerging Market Asia Credit Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) index suite will be the first Bloomberg Barclays MSCI suite consisting of three index variants that track the performance of emerging market US$-denominated credit debt in the region, while incorporating ESG risk and exposure measures. With three flagship ESG index variants aimed to meet different ESG investment approaches – Socially Responsible, Sustainability, and ESG-weighted – the index is designed to meet driving demand for ESG Investing in emerging markets.
Fitch Ratings has launched an interactive ESG dashboard for public finance and global infrastructure. The tool, which users can adjust by region, sub-region and sub-sector, shows the distribution of ESG Relevance Scores (ESG.RS) for 2,647 issues and/or transactions across the Infrastructure, IPF, LRG, GRE, USPF, Tax and Revenue sectors. The dashboard shows the distribution of ESG.RS changes for 3Q20 and will be updated each quarter.
The first of a new series of ESG report cards for the US public finance sector has been published by S&P Global Ratings. The report, titled ‘ESG US Public Finance Report Card: Tri-State Region Governments And Not-For-Profit Enterprises’ covers the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut region, and lists ESG insights for select governments and not-for-profit entities. “Our ESG report cards qualitatively explore the relative exposures of UPSD issuers to ESG credit factors over the short, medium and long term,” said Nora Wittstruck, S&P Global Ratings credit analyst.
Tech business Datamaran has announced the approval of its US patent application covering the company’s analytical architecture, which captures risks, including ESG, in real-time. The technology is integrated in a SaaS analytics platform that provides company-specific analytics on external risks. Datamaran claims to be the only company to fully automate and digitise ESG materiality analysis to enable dynamic monitoring.
