Stockholm (NordSIP) – At the recent ESG Investing Awards 2021, judges selected Schroders’ proprietary SustainEx™ tool as the Most Innovative ESG Product of the year due to “its unique and granular quantification of ESG measures”.
“We believe that companies do not operate in a vacuum, they are part of the societies from which they draw their employees, to which they sell their products and under whose laws they compete. Traditionally, they were largely able to focus on maximising current profits without much concern for the costs their actions created elsewhere in societies and economies,” Hannah Simons, Head of Sustainability Strategy at Schroders, commented.
The award was attributed by an independent panel of judges that included representatives from financial markets, academics and experts, which described Schroders’ tool as ‘thought provoking’ and ‘exceptional in a space that can be nebulous and qualitative’, according to the UK-based asset manager.
“In recent years (…), companies have been put under increasing societal and governmental pressure to take responsibility for the costs and impacts that their actions results in. We developed SustainEx to address what we saw as a gap in the existing approaches to investment analysis that didn’t account for sustainability and impact-related risks and costs,” Simons added.
SustainEx is a service that estimates the positive and negative effects that a business has on the world, so as to clarify the wider benefit of a portfolio to stakeholder. The result is an aggregate measurement of company risk, a dollar-cost or benefit, comparable across companies, funds and indices.
“SustainEx is focused on driving real change by providing investors with the opportunity to identify and quantify these impacts to ensure that they are reflected in investment decisions and valuations. We are therefore delighted to see that SustainEx has been recognised as the most innovative ESG product by ESG Investing,” she said.
SustainEx™ is based on over 700 academic studies, applied to 13,000 companies globally and is a part of Schroders’ ImpactIQ, a toolbox that combines a range of proprietary technologies driven by traditional and non-traditional data. Other tools include Schroders’ CONTEXT, Carbon Value at Risk and ThemEx
“We look forward to continuing to develop ImpactIQ, a suite of data generated sustainability and impact investing tools, with the aim of enriching our research process and enabling our investors to make informed investment decisions. For our clients, the tools help them understand how their investments are aligned with their ESG principles,” Simons concluded.
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