New Offering Provides More Data Point Assessments and ESG Themes Compared with Existing Ratings
MUNICH (August 5, 2020) — ISS ESG, the responsible investment arm of Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS), today announced the launch of a new, best-in-class fund ratings solution assessing the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance of more than 20,000 investment funds, globally.
ISS ESG Fund Ratings and Screening provides clients with the ability to quickly and effectively evaluate and illuminate fund and peer performance across major ESG themes, supported by an industry leading 1,000+ data factors per fund, generating and supporting critical research, screening, and analytics.
The new ratings solution will draw on ISS ESG’s best-in-class ESG ratings, governance data, norm-based research, energy and extractives screens, Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) impact ratings, carbon emissions analysis, shareholder meeting voting outcomes, and more, to form a composite and holistic picture of a fund’s ESG performance. Fund Screening packages go beyond core ESG Fund Ratings to include Sector Based Screen-aligned thematic data sets and SDG Solutions.
“ISS ESG continues to innovate and deliver to market cutting-edge solutions that draw on the industry’s deepest well of ESG data and a deliberate approach to product development,” said Marija Kramer, Head of ISS ESG. “In keeping with our commitment to clients, this new solution will provide them a significant advantage over other offerings alongside unrivalled support from our client success teams.”
Funds will be rated on a relative scale of one (bottom) to five (top) stars with additional signals including an absolute score and the fund’s Prime status. Relative scoring will be based on the fund’s standing within the Lipper Global Benchmark class. Fund rating coverage requires that a minimum of 65 percent of a fund’s holdings by weight be covered by ISS ESG’s Corporate Ratings.
ISS ESG Fund Ratings will have broad utility for a wide swath of financial investing professionals. Fund managers will benefit from the new ISS ESG Fund Ratings solution to help build and optimize existing products while financial advisors will be better able to identify for client’s funds that meet ESG standards. Moreover, and given the volume of data factors underlying the ISS ESG Fund Rating, users can closely match individual responsible investment policies of their clients thereby being able to map individual holdings policies with an aligned fund selection. Defined benefit and defined contribution providers, meanwhile, can leverage fund ratings data feeds to automatically integrate content.
