Consulting & Special Research

Key Investor Services: Metrics, Assessment and Integration of ESG into Existing Portfolios - 

Our team will help you to develop an ESG integration strategy that matches your investment goals. From ESG screens to ESG metrics in the pursuit of ‘green alpha’, we help investors to develop the strategy, tools and performance indicators to integrate ESG into investment decisions.

Shareholder Activism and Assessing Sustainability Performance of Assets - 

Gathering ESG data from assets can be difficult, let alone understanding the best course of action to use that data to best influence the sustainability performance of assets. Our team has over a decade of experience working with corporate investor relations and sustainability teams as well as corporate sustainability reporting, rankings and data analytic firms. We utilize this experience to help investors make sense of reported data, identify and fill critical gaps that represent material risks or opportunities to the asset. We also help investors to work actively with assets to improve both ESG and financial performance.

Private Equity ESG Assessments -

Private Equity firms face a particular challenge when looking for material ESG risks and opportunities of potential investments. Information is scarce and target companies frequently do not understand or recognize material ESG factors. Our team helps private equity firms to assess ESG factors of potential targets and works with new acquisitions to rapidly ‘ramp up’ sustainability performance to protect and enhance growth.

How are ESG ratings and indices constructed? Which indicators are the most important in assessing ESG characteristics? Does the answer vary by sector and country/region?

The dizzying array of ESG indicators relate differently to companies’ financial performance, therefore, the relationship between simulated portfolios and performance varied. Given the variation in conceptualization and construction of both independent and dependent variables, it is unsurprising that there is no clear consensus on how ESG considerations have affected performance.

Understanding the relative significance of the different ESG issues is not only important for advancing the theoretical underpinnings of how ESG captures hard-to-observe firm characteristics that ultimately translate into an observable performance but also critical for the advanced integration of ESG factors into stock selection and portfolio construction. 

As investing with ESG principles continues to gain momentum, more and more investors employ third-party ESG ratings and create their own ESG indices in the construction of their propriety models.

There are many ways to construct a company ESG score, involving different combinations of financial and nonfinancial inputs. Our experienced researchers use data that are more granular to help our clients develop their specific ESG ratings or indices.

We provide Investor Relations and Sustainability Perception Studies, have 100+ years combined experience in IR, and expertise on the issues most relevant to ESG, including the dynamic metrics due to COVID-19. Investors and other stakeholders are asking how companies are responding to the pandemic, and how they will be addressing other issues that have been longer present, but are now seen to merit more urgent action than before. We work with you to identify the questions, the most relevant fund managers, buy and sellside analysts, credit analysts, and ESG specialists, and we conduct each study ourselves, for IR, ESG, or both, and provide verbatim detail and board-ready summaries. 

We can help you develop and implement your sustainability strategy and communications, databases, annual and ad-hoc reports, supply chain benchmarks and more. 

Investors and other stakeholders are expecting more in order to be able to make their decisions, and ratings agencies sometimes favor companies with greater resources. 

We can help as an outsourced resource to form and communicate your corporate purpose, long-term sustainability framework, and strategy, in order to increase financial returns and societal benefit.