A-Team Insight Brief
EY Survey Shows Growing Demand for Consistent ESG Reporting Standards
A survey by professional services giant EY Assurance has found that three quarters of financial leaders want to see more consistent ESG reporting standards and that they must be mandatory. A similar proportion of the 1,000 executives interviewed said that ESG was a “significant part of their role” – up from two-thirds in the poll last year. Nevertheless around a third of respondents said that there was a lack of real-time data and information with long-term value. And almost a quarter said there was a “disconnect” between reporting ESG and mainstream financial information. “There is no doubt that the drive towards improved sustainability reporting is gaining momentum… but there is a steep mountain to climb,” said Marie-Laure Delarue, EY Global Vice Chair.
Moody’s Expands ESG Credit Ratings to More Industries
Moody’s Investors Service has widened its coverage of ESG credit risk scores to industries including oil and gas, utilities, semiconductors and financial services. The rating company offers issuer profile scores for 1,700 borrowers including companies, nations and regional entities, measuring their exposure to ESG-related risks. It also provides credit impact scores, which give an indication of the impact those ESG measures have on an issuer’s credit rating. Each gauge is expressed on a five-point scale.
Leveraged Finance Investors Call for More Loans ESG Data
European investors in leveraged finance instruments have called for more sustainability data on the securities. The European Leveraged Finance Association (ELFA) has urged vendors to do more to increase transparency into the asset class. The organisation said vendors covered no more than 10 per cent of leveraged loans. That compares with up to 79 per cent coverage of investment grade borrowers.
NeoXam Partners Data Management Consultancy Soranus
NeoXam continues to extend its partner portfolio with the addition of a strategic agreement with Soranus, a data management consultancy. The agreement is designed to support client implementation projects of the company’s DataHub across Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
Arteria AI Acquires H4 to Further Develop Digital Documentation Solution
Arteria AI, a provider of enterprise digital documentation, has agreed to acquire certain financial services assets of H4, a lifecycle management platform. H4’s chairman and co-founder Joe Seifert will join Arteria AI’s team as a senior advisor. Arteria AI, a Deloitte spin off, works with large banks to accelerate client documentation processes at scale. From document generation to signature, the company uses context-specific AI, data, analytics and automation to allow stakeholders across the bank to serve clients more quickly.
Quant Insight and Symphony Partner to Provide Macro Analytics Insights
Quantitative analytics vendor Quant Insight (Qi) has partnered with Symphony, the market infrastructure and technology platform, to offer macro-based insights to Symphony’s global financial community. Qi’s Retina (Real time Notifications and Alerts) will sit on the Symphony platform and push macro-based insights into Symphony chat rooms in real time. With Retina, Symphony users will be alerted to macro-based valuation anomalies, shifts in key macro drivers and changes in underlying trends covering 6,000 market instruments including indices, sectors, stocks, FX, rates, futures, commodities, and cryptocurrencies. Retina makes extensive use of machine learning technology, and the Qi team includes experienced former portfolio managers from Brevan Howard, Millennium, BlueCrest, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, and others.
FactSet Adds Fixed Income Trading Capabilities to Portware
FactSet, the global provider of financial information and analytical applications, has launched a suite of fixed income trading capabilities for Portware, its execution management system (EMS) best known for electronic trading and automation in listed assets and FX. With the introduction of fixed income trading, Portware now enables clients to trade more efficiently across more asset classes. In addition to connecting to established trading venues, FactSet is integrating with several data providers and trading destinations to display pre-trade analytics related to pricing and liquidity, as well as sourcing content from FactSet’s own fixed income data and analytics libraries. Further investment and integrations are planned to aggregate additional liquidity sources for FactSet’s trading clients. The new capabilities were built in collaboration with FactSet’s client GIC, to support GIC’s global trading desks.
ED&F Man Deploys TS Imagine for Risk and Margin Management
ED&F Man Capital Markets has deployed TS Imagine’s real-time risk, compliance and margin platform, to manage initial and variation margin risk for SPAN and VaR based methodologies across its futures and options trading and clearing business, replacing its legacy systems with TS Imagine’s fully-hosted, SaaS solution for high-volume, real-time analytics on cross-asset exchange-based and OTC trading. The platform is now live, and since deploying the platform, which displays risk, profit/loss and margin analytics side-by-side, ED&F Man has already seen improvements to data management, aggregation and reporting capabilities, according to the company. TS Imagine was formed earlier this year with the merger of TradingScreen and Imagine Software.
Supply Chain ESG Solution Launched by Sustainalytics
Sustainalytics has created Corporate Supply Chain ESG Solutions, a service that will enable clients to gauge the sustainability of companies in their supply chains. The Morningstar unit said the offering would help many industries assess, report and mitigate their ESG risks. The product is delivered through Sustainlytics’ ESG Assessment Platform and draws on the Amsterdam-based company’s huge data pools and its ESG Risk Ratings product.
APAA ESG Risk Guide Stops Short of Mandatory Disclosures
The Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority has become the latest overseer to issue a guidance on banks’ management of climate risks in their portfolios. While its latest guidance offers advice on how institutions should approach the issue, it does not advocate mandatory ESG disclosures. Instead, the regulator said lenders should consider whether other “voluntary disclosures could be beneficial in enhancing transparency and giving confidence to the wider market”.