The Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) has launched three new guides for asset owners, outlining how they can ensure environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations remain at the heart of their relationships with investment managers. The guides cover manager selection, appointment, and monitoring of third-party external managers.
CAMRADATA, a provider of data and analysis for institutional investors, says this move from PRI shines a light on the growing importance of ESG in terms of impacting investment strategies and decision making.
This also follows research from Russell Investments which shows that 78% of asset managers now explicitly incorporate qualitative or quantitative ESG factor assessments into their investment processes, an increase of 5 per cent when compared to last year.
Amy Richardson, Senior Director, CAMRADATA says, “ESG is no longer a nice to have, but a must for many investors. To reflect this, we have launched new ESG services this year to provide Asset owners with data, insight and research into the ESG credentials of asset managers to empower them with knowledge to challenge investment managers, spot greenwashing, and drive better ESG integration and engagement.”
Earlier this year CAMRADATA launched a new feature within its CAMRADATA Live research platform that enables investors to easily review the ESG capabilities of over 700 asset managers on the data and easily compare them like for like. Investors can use this free of charge service to run ESG reports on every asset manager within CAMRADATA Live and compare them across key areas including their investment policy and firm structure; investment process; active ownership; and approach to reporting.
CAMRADATA Live also offers an Assisted Search Service which enables investors to source bespoke ESG manager research specific market insights and help establish universes for ESG-related funds. One of the key benefits of this service is it is run anonymously and selects and connects users with the right investment managers. This service has proved very popular with clients which CAMRADATA recently discussed in a press release.
CAMRADATA also produces regular whitepapers on various topics and in 2020 one of its key focus areas has been ESG, with four papers published which are available here including, ‘ESG in Fixed Income’, ‘Responsible Investing’, ‘Climate Change Investing’ and ‘Impact Investing’.
Sean Thompson, Managing Director, CAMRADATA, adds: “ESG is a fast growing influencer of investment strategies and asset owners now expect their third-party asset managers to demonstrate not only a deep level of ESG analysis, but show how ESG is integrated within wider investment processes.
“Failure to do this could result in firms being accused of ‘greenwashing’. Using our new ESG feature in CAMRADATA Live and other ESG services we give asset managers the tools to deliver full ESG transparency, which in turn helps investors apply more scrutiny to the ESG capabilities of their asset managers on our database.”
