An increasing number of financial advisors are leveraging ESG data available at Bloomberg, evidenced by the growth of “ESG power users” by 33% in 2016, according to Barbara Pomfret, Bloomberg’s ESG product manager.
Before joining Joele Frank in 2017 as a Managing Director in New York, Barbara Pomfret was Bloomberg’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) global product manager where, among her responsibilities, was integration of ESG content into Bloomberg’s sector research.
Prior to Bloomberg, Barbara was an ESG analyst in the Sustainability Research team at Allianz Global Investors in London and Frankfurt.
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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.
Ms. 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.”
Source: Financial Advisor
