GoldenSource has launched GoldenSource ESG Impact, providing unrivalled ESG data coverage, comparison, quality checks and portfolio screening.
Through a large network of ESG data provider partners and content specialists, the solution offers full depth and breadth of ESG data coverage. Going further, GoldenSource inbound APIs enable on-boarding of current and future structured and unstructured ESG content from new data sources.
GoldenSource ESG Impact supports all standard and data vendor-proprietary materiality maps, enabling buy and sell-side firms to compare what the different data providers consider useful information, regarding specific ESG criterion in a given industry sector. Users can pull together scores, ratings and ranks from the broad range of sources and then drill down into the relevant underlying data points, thus providing market participants with insights most relevant to their business or investment strategy. Crucially, it enables data quality checks, validating metrics against data standards while also checking completeness, staleness and plausibility, making firms less susceptible to greenwashing.
Because of the underlying GoldenSource platform, the solution enables portfolio screening, meaning that users can leverage a leading data model to look through portfolios seamlessly to instruments and their issuing legal entities to related ESG content. This will become a critical capability across the industry as ESG regulations and competitive ESG investment strategies evolve. Significantly, historical data is held to ensure that any changes in ESG status over time are visible and can be acted upon.
Volker Lainer, VP of Product Management and Regulatory Affairs at GoldenSource said: “As ESG has grown market participants have had to sift through an overwhelming amount of information from multiple sources, each with its particular content strengths and refined methodology to provide valuable insights. Our solution means that not only will users be able to discover and compare more useful ESG metrics and granular data across multiple sources, but also check the ESG metrics through a data quality framework. This will help navigate the changing regulatory environment and the challenges with discerning what is truly considered a ‘sustainable’ investment and what conforms to a published ESG strategy.”
In addition to clients having their own version integrated into their technology stack, GoldenSource ESG Impact will also be available in a low-footprint managed service version, where GoldenSource manages the solution and the integration via an API. Clients will then simply submit any number of portfolios for screening, and the relevant ESG data that the client has subscribed to will automatically be returned. With new data sources added on an ongoing basis, users will have the ability to assess and alter decision making, adapting to the new information made available to them.
John Eley, CEO of GoldenSource added: “This is a breakthrough as the growing volumes and increasing need for ESG data makes the investment landscape more complex. The solution is built on a foundation of market leading data management capabilities, but also GoldenSource’s experience in modelling ESG attributes, which makes it mature for this area of the financial markets. As part of our wider offering, GoldenSource ESG Impact slots in to create a bridge from the portfolio to the ESG content that otherwise portfolio managers would need to do themselves, making investment decision making more efficient.”
About ESG Impact Portfolio Screening
ESG data types have been defined and used in the GoldenSource data model for a number of years. The native cross-referencing of data types in the model means that GoldenSource ESG Impact can look into a portfolio, through to the instruments it holds, on to the related issuing legal entities (at any hierarchical level of a group structure) and then into all related ESG data from all available sources. This can then be aggregated or rolled-up at any level, such that Portfolio Managers can screen the portfolio for all relevant ESG insights, status and changes in status (by comparing with historical data). GoldenSource is confident that this is a unique offering among ESG solutions.
Furthermore, within GoldenSource ESG Impact, despite the heterogeneous nature of ESG data, users can be confident in being able to compare all data that it is possible to compare, while avoiding mistaken comparisons between seemingly like but actually non-comparable data. This is because all the materiality maps that data providers produce are cross referenced within the system. This is another capability that is native to the GoldenSource platform, used widely for various classification and identifier taxonomies.