Amsterdam-based Sustainalytics and San Francisco-based Glass Lewis & Co. LLC are teaming up to integrate environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into the global governance services provided to more than 1,200 institutional investors.
The partnership will see Sustainalytics, an independent ESG and corporate governance research firm, provide its data for the development of an ESG profile page that will be incorporated into Glass Lewis’ proxy research reports.
Users of Glass Lewis’ proxy voting platform will also be given access to Sustainalytics’ data for analysis, screening and voting purposes; they will have the ability to incorporate ESG factors into their custom voting policies.
“Just as portfolio managers and analysts are increasingly integrating ESG factors into their investment processes, those professionals responsible for their firms’ proxy voting policies and, ultimately, their actual proxy votes, also need insights into how these issues are being managed within the boardroom,” says Michael Jantzi, CEO at Sustainalytics, in a statement released on Thursday.
“We are pleased to be partnering with Glass Lewis to make these important ESG insights more accessible to governance decision-makers,” adds Jantzi, the developer of the first socially responsible investing index in Canada, and who founded Toronto-based ESG research firm, Jantzi Research Inc., in 1992. The firm was merged with Sustainalytics in 1999.
The partnership between Sustainalytics and Glass Lewis will benefit institutional investors who want to better understand how their portfolio companies are managing their ESG risk, according to Katherine Rabin, CEO of Glass Lewis, which was founded in 2003 and has more than 1,200 clients that use its proxy research and proxy vote management tools.
“By combining our governance solutions with Sustainalytics’ high-quality research, extensive data and global scope,” she says in the statement, “we can immediately deliver meaningful ESG insights to Glass Lewis clients, helping them understand and connect with the companies in which they invest.”