Stockholm (NordSIP) – Recently, Swedish fund selection platform Fundrella has been on a roll. At the end of August, the company announced that it had secured a fresh injection of venture capital funding, which should help accelerate its further growth. Then, on 6 September, the firm welcomed a new Chief Operating Officer, Struan Malcolm. With a solid background in asset management, asset servicing and distribution, the former head of Nordic sales at Northern Trust’s Asset Servicing business should be a great addition to the small but efficient team.
Continuing this positive spiral, on 26 September, Fundrella announced the launch of ESG Fund Search Engine 2.0. The latest version of the platform’s enhanced fund search engine, which already includes over fifty proprietary ESG data points, introduces a new suite of data available through the European ESG Template (EET). The firm’s tech-savvy team has developed a way to incorporate the additional information, sourcing it automatically from the official ESG data exchange template compliant with the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation.
This development should be welcome news for professional investors on Fundrella’s platform. According to Wava Bodin, Founder & CEO of Fundrella, who has had numerous discussions with clients, the need to provide an automated solution is obvious. “No one seems to know how to incorporate all this massive and detailed raw data into their daily workflow in fund selection and ESG analysis,” she concludes.
“We hope our new search engine will finally help professional investors digest all of this data so that more informed investment decisions can be made to accelerate the sustainable transition,” says Bodin. “We are delighted to offer all ESG data and this easy, quick and intuitive fund search functionality free of charge to all professional investors, globally,” she adds.
Asset managers, too, should benefit from the newly incorporated data that enables them to benchmark their funds’ ESG positioning relative to peers in terms of hundreds of ESG data points. “Fundrella’s growing client base of global asset managers use our analytics to gain and maintain a competitive edge, to prioritise prospect conversations, and to use data-driven insights to hold better-informed conversations with their existing clients,” explains Bodin.
With the burden of reporting requirements increasing steadily, fintech firms like Fundrella have been busy trying to alleviate some of the pressure from investors’ shoulders. Hopefully, more standardisation and automation would free some valuable time for conducting actual sustainability work.
