SIX has kickstarted a programme of ESG product releases planned for 2024 with the unveiling of a climate data offering, part of the Swiss financial services giant’s evolution into a “one-stop shop” for data and analytics.
The latest addition to SIX’s sustainability data armoury will feature climate-specific datasets supplied by MSCI, Inrate and the CDP, complementing the company’s existing broader ESG data services. The total package gives clients visibility into the climate performance of more than 33,000 companies and will soon be followed by more products including a nature-focused data offering and an analytics product.
Martina MacPherson, head ESG product strategy and management, financial information at SIX, said the slew of planned ESG product releases have been two years in the making. They are a critical step in SIX’s ambitions to become a leading data aggregator for financial institutions.
“Our key is … to become a one-stop shop for data and, going forwards, analytical solutions, aiming to build capabilities for normalising and aggregating information via a multi-vendor single source,” MacPherson told ESG Insight.
Speciality Data
The new products will build on SIX’s baseline provision of fundamental ESG data sets to concentrate on specialised information that will enable institutions to focus their assessments and research either thematically, by asset class or other specifications, including geospatial capabilities.
It encompasses historical and forward-looking datasets and includes MSCI’s Carbon Delta datasets for climate risk analysis, climate change metrics and climate value-at-risk (VAR) data. They can be used in conjunction with data from SIX’s “fundamentals” family of datasets, which include corporate ratings and ethical value, defensive weapons and controversies screening information. The addition of CDP data will offer SIX clients access to broader climate risk and assessment capabilities, MacPherson said.
“This is very important in this context because it’s the baseline for many of the other providers using climate risk data and information,” she said.
MacPherson said SIX has identified five specific use cases for climate risk data: emissions footprinting, screening and scoring as well as green-brown share analysis at portfolio level; regulatory compliance; analytics, including SIX’s own service that will be launched later in the year; and, forward-looking scores and analytics, such as climate VAR and scenario analysis.
Future Plans
SIX had extensively consulted market participants to identify what they need in climate data, MacPherson added. Among the trends the company has identified is a preference among larger clients for raw data feeds that they can utilise in their own analytical systems. There’s a similar need among smaller clients, who buy ratings and scores because they don’t have the capabilities to process underlying data.
By aggregating data, analytics and technology, SIX can serve those needs, MacPherson said. Clients will also benefit from the delivery of the data via SIX’s VDFS Prime channel, which data vendors rarely integrate.
Future developments will also give access to the data via flat files and APIs, and more value-added services would include data quality assurance and assessments of data providers that are authorised by ESMA. There are also plans to assess contributors to the European Single Access Point (ESAP) concept, which envisages a free-to-access region-wide data base.
“We are in Switzerland, we are still neutral and we want to work with the best in class providers,” MacPherson said. “We want to make sure that clients get access to the data they need across universes, across segments, across jurisdictions and across the different types of platforms that are out there.”
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