ESG and Sustainability Reporting

Whilst ESG has been mainstream for the last decade, investor appetite in the 2020s is taking greater account of sustainable value, with ESG being viewed as a key contributor to financial performance and long-term value. For many, ESG offers the chance to raise the moral purpose of investing, to deliver the sustainable economic development of shareholders, stakeholders and the planet.

For asset managers ESG provides a chance to reach new investors, to develop new revenue streams, to bid for institutional pools of money from charities and public sector pension funds. Then there are the many millennials who have just entered the workforce and are beginning to invest for the first time. ESG funds are a means to connect with this fast-growing market.

With these opportunities come challenges. ESG ratings and benchmarks have experienced a rapid expansion, and with this an extraordinary degree of fragmentation. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) eports that there are over 2,000 individual ESG reporting indicators requested by the approximately 600 ratings and benchmarks.

On top of the fragmentation issue there is the question of definitions. Without a consistent definition of what ESG ratings are supposed to measure or even a consistent view of what constitutes a relevant ESG issue, it is obviously difficult to gauge their effectiveness. Even the UN PRI has yet to provide a definition.

Requirement

When reporting goalposts move frequently and at speed, when investors demand accurate, validated, real-time ESG data, asset managers need to have full understanding and control of their data; to be able to access data from multiple sources in a timely way; to demonstrate accuracy and provenance; to have a data gathering & management process that is underpinned by good data governance; and accompanied by a full audit trail.

Challenges

• Data is often stored in multiple systems, databases and formats, which frequently do not interact with each other.
• Sourcing data, which may not have been needed before, from legacy systems can be timeconsuming & costly.
• Data has varying levels of accuracy and is often inconsistent or incomplete. Correcting many hundreds of lines of data and enriching that data with information from external sources can also be time-consuming & costly.

Solution

Gather 360 enables asset managers to:

1. Access the data they need - Gather 360 enables data gathering from different sources and systems across the business including legacy infrastructures, multiple databases and diverse IT platforms as well as data from external providers; in different formats; financial & non-financial.
2. Create a standard database or format - - Gather 360 sends data requests to the selected data sources, stipulating the clear and structured format required, ensuring the request can be understood and confirmed. Gather 360 identifies critical errors, provides warnings on data-quality and relays these to the data-sources for correction.
3. Enrich the data - Gather 360 can enrich data with additional information from external sources.
4. Certify data accuracy - - Once the data requests are returned, validated, consolidated and transformed, the data is certified accurate, ready for reporting, sharing, analysis or to power other systems & tools.
5. Automate data gathering - Gather 360 will automate the process, providing real-time data in the required format.
6. Audit the data trail - Gather 360 provides a full data gathering & validation audit trail.

Unlike most data tools, gather 360 is designed for business users, not the IT team. It's easy to configure & deploy via a web-portal and comes with a bespoke dashboard. Gather 360 is secure. It’s hosted on Azure cloud, but it can also reside within the businesses’ infrastructure.

Here’s how gather 360 works