Aligning Investment Decisions with ESG Goals & Objectives

For many of us 2021 will likely be remembered as (yet another) year of COVID-19, but thankfully it might also go down in history as the year in which the ESG movement truly took off. The need for organizations to consider Environmental, Social, and Governance factors in their decision making has grown exponentially, and culminated with the announcement during the UN’s COP26 summit of the creation of the International Sustainability Standards Board—in effect the ESG twin to the universally accepted International Financial Report Standards.

All this is good news for the asset management community, which had already incorporated the foundations of ESG thinking in its 2014 management standard ISO 55001. The standard calls for:

• Risk-informed and value-based decision-making, from a position of knowledge
• Cross-functional collaboration and clear communication with internal and external stakeholders
• Rigorous reporting requirements
• Assurance of intended outcomes

Copperleaf is heavily involved in the development of the ISO 55000 series, and our software solutions are perfectly aligned with the standard. Our clients have been using our solutions to deploy decision-making frameworks that incorporate ESG elements for years. A recent survey shows that no less than 70% of all models in the Copperleaf Value Model Library include ESG criteria. This confirms that good asset management and ESG are strongly aligned, and prompted us to write a white paper on this topic.

You will find the paper here, and more information on the implementation of ESG in Copperleaf’s software solutions can be found here.