A growing number of financial advisors are taking advantage of the rich trove of data on ESG investing available at Bloomberg. They understand that using ESG company research is an integral part of brand development for their RIA or platform-based practice and supports the long-term sustainability of their client investment portfolio choices.

Barbara Pomfret, Bloomberg’s ESG product manager, told me that the number of ESG “power users” grew by 33 percent in 2016. These users, Pomfret explained, register a minimum of 10 hits per week on Bloomberg’s dedicated ESG functions. The Bloomberg Sustainable Finance Brief is also one of the most popular briefs on its news platform.

What’s behind such a rapid growth rate? When we follow the growth of ESG investing in the industry, we see that in 2015 over 20 percent of professionally managed assets, or $8.7 trillion in the U.S., incorporated ESG metrics in selecting companies for investment, based on the US SIF Report on Sustainable, Responsible and Impact Investing Trends 2016. In addition, 81 percent of S&P 500 companies published a sustainability or corporate responsibility report in 2015, up from just 20 percent in 2011, according to research by the Governance & Accountability Institute.

This means there is ESG data available to investment analysts for more companies today.  
So, advisors who want to understand what’s behind this growth can go to the Bloomberg ESG Analysis Page at ESG <GO> and review the hundreds of data points for each of the 11,000 companies that Bloomberg follows for ESG data. For example, advisors can see what companies are tracking energy efficiency, waste water recycling or the percentage of female board members, as well as the carbon footprint for a single firm or an entire industry.

Pomfret explained that as more companies started reporting on ESG metrics, she saw the value of consolidating this information onto one ESG Analysis Page at Bloomberg. This makes it easy for advisors and asset managers to find the data and do analysis by company and by industry sector.

Gregory Elders, a Bloomberg Intelligence senior ESG analyst, explains the value of the ESG Analysis Page to analysts and advisors: “The development of the ESG Analysis Page on the Bloomberg platform has helped sustainability analysts get easier access to portfolio managers at their firms and distribute their work to other analysts across the platform.”

This sets the expectation for growth in the amount of ESG data that will be siloed on the platform over the next three to five years, and increases its value to investors and advisors.

Pomfret and Elders developed their ESG analyst chops in Europe and London with Bloomberg and other firms before taking their current positions in New York. That experience helped them to understand the importance of the regulatory environment.

They closely follow development of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), and are confident about a big step forward in standard setting for the value of ESG data in U.S. markets. This will accelerate regulation around company reporting, as well as reporting by asset managers of large public pension funds in Europe and the U.S., allowing investors and their advisors to bring greater clarity to ESG data valuation in the investment process.