How Bloomberg is applying its data expertise to ESG | Insights | Bloomberg Professional Services

In a recent fireside chat, Brad Foster, Bloomberg’s Head of Enterprise Data Content discussed some of the key challenges to ESG data management and performance – and how Bloomberg can help address them.

Integration and interoperability

For ESG datasets to work well with an organization’s existing security master, pricing, reference, and corporate actions datasets, the data must be able to be integrated, and interoperable.

ESG data has to play well with other, existing datasets. This can be hard to achieve, as ESG data isn’t standardized yet. Bloomberg has figured out how to connect ESG data with existing data and extract value from it immediately. Bloomberg does this by using common identifiers to link the data – whether it’s at the entity or instrument level – and common symbiology.”

Filling the data gaps

Change often invites challenges, and among the most significant challenges facing asset managers are major coverage gaps and a lack of consistency in company reporting, especially when it comes to disclosing carbon footprints.

It’s not enough to just have company-reported data and nothing else, because there is not enough company-reported data currently out there to meet ESG regulatory needs or make investment decisions. In many cases, organizations need to rely on estimates while corporate reporting catches up.

Bloomberg provides customers with almost 1,000 points of third-party content along with our own unique proprietary scores using 700-plus research analysts across Bloomberg Intelligence and BloombergNEF. By the end of 2022, our Disclosure Scores will cover almost 15,000 companies and our Industry Materiality Scores will cover almost 5,500 companies. By the end of 2023, our Industry Materiality Scores will also cover 15,000 companies.

Data you can trust

Asset managers know that being able to generate and access trustworthy, transparent data is essential if they’re going to successfully navigate the sustainable finance landscape.

But in a world with an abundance of data, how can you balance working with different ESG taxonomies, frameworks, and standards, the demands of multiple, evolving regulatory requirements in local and global markets, and investor expectations of increasingly in-depth and insightful impact analyses?

As an agnostic provider of quality data, scores, and data solutions, Bloomberg demonstrates transparency in this area in three main ways:

1. With representative data – To be eligible for inclusion in Bloomberg’s proprietary scoring, company-reported data must represent at least 80% of operations and 80% of the workforce. This is how Bloomberg ensures a score is truly representative of company activity. Users can examine the scoring methodology and the company-reported data underlying each score.
2. With as-reported and estimated carbon data – Bloomberg collects carbon emissions reported by companies and, using multiple modeling approaches, provides estimates for those that don’t report, resulting in a coverage of over 100,000 companies, with data going back to 2010.  Bloomberg’s GHG emissions estimates model provides a distribution of estimates and a confidence score showing the quality and availability of data for these estimates.
3. With a high-quality ESG Fund Analytics offering – To overcome the lack of transparency around the ESG profile of ETFs and mutual funds, Bloomberg’s ESG Fund Analytics offering provides objective and standardized ESG Data for 61,000 global Mutual Funds and 10,000 ETFs, spanning core ESG considerations including company policies, carbon emissions, resource consumption, waste management, governance and diversity, and inclusion. Clients can easily compare funds and invest according to their ESG objectives and preferences.

To find out more, speak with a Bloomberg representative about our ESG data offerings.