Jamie Hicks

10 years after the Lehman collapse, how do Financial Services companies perform on ESG? This comprehensive new report presents Vigeo Eiris’ analysis of 228 companies in the Financial Services General sector.

Impact investing is a growing practice defined by its intent to generate positive social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. Impact investments are made across the globe, and developing economies provide ample opportunities for market-based solutions and investment capital to address social and environmental challenges. Southeast Asia is developing rapidly, but the region also faces social and environmental challenges that offer substantial potential for impact investments. Indeed, almost a third of impact investors invest in Southeast Asia, and 44% plan to grow their impact investing allocations to the region in the year ahead. The Landscape for Impact Investing in Southeast Asia report provides much-needed information about the impact investing market in Southeast Asia to inform investors already allocating capital or considering investing in the region. This report provides detailed information about the investing activity and trends in 11 countries: Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. It outlines challenges and opportunities for impact investors and analyzes political and economic factors that may inform investment decisions in each country.

The Insurance Sector: Vigeo Eiris releases its exclusive research & opinion on emerging & strategic issues. This comprehensive new report presents Vigeo Eiris’ analysis, ratings and rankings of the ESG performance-related trends and impacts of 159 listed companies in the Insurance sector. Further details available here

This report evaluates the investment performance of ESG, paying particular attention to recent performance and highlighting the difference between ESG scores that overlap with traditional risk model factors and those that don’t. The analysis indicates that, in general, increasing exposure to ESG rarely underperforms the market, and often outperforms the market, especially during the last few years.

With global political instability, Brexit and the #MeToo movement, the landscape organisations operate in is shifting. ‘Good work’ has risen up the agenda following the publication of the Taylor Review, and in the reporting space the first year of gender pay gap reporting regulations has illustrated that it is possible to mandate for the reporting of key workforce indicators. Both developments represent a renewed interest in fairness and inequality in work, and while the effect of gender pay gap reporting has yet to be fully understood, it has kick-started an important debate about the standardisation of workforce data and disclosures

This comprehensive new report presents Vigeo Eiris’ analysis of the performance-related trends and impacts of 148 companies in the global energy sector, with exclusive data on ESG, Carbon Footprint, Energy Transition, Controversies, the Sustainable Development Goals and more. For more information and the full report click here

The world has great expectations for how the private sector, both companies and investors, can support the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In fact, it is generally believed that these goals cannot be achieved without strong support from the private sector. But will making the world a better place hurt financial returns? The answer is “No” if companies focus on the SDGs and their associated targets that benefit from strong performance on the material ESG issues that matter to investors. In this paper MDPI maps the 30 generic ESG issues identified by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) to the SDGs and their targets. This paper is divided into four parts. Part I explains the motivation for this study. Part II explains methodology and Part III the results. Part IV concludes with a summary of results and some reflections on how mapping methodology can be improved. Betti, G.; Consolandi, C.; Eccles, R.G. The Relationship between Investor Materiality and the Sustainable Development Goals: A Methodological Framework. Sustainability 2018, 10, 2248.

Business ethics breaches have emerged as the most material ESG concern for investors in the pharmaceutical and broader healthcare sector, and has been the key focus of our engagement with the sector in recent years. The industry has been repeatedly become embroiled in allegations with regards to marketing and sales related fraud and other lapses in compliance. Companies have been hampered by substantial risks and mounting costs associated with the prosecution by authorities. We estimate that $50 billion have been paid out by leading pharmaceutical companies in the past decade in conduct related regulatory, settlements fines and costs.

In this report, The Finance Innovation Lab argue that the present moment offers an opportunity to step back and ask regulators what outcomes they are regulating the financial system for, and what kind of financial system – as well as what kind of regulatory system – can best achieve those outcomes.