Robeco shares sustainable investment IP to drive industry collaboration on data

Robeco is sharing its sustainable investment data with industry participants and academics in a push to streamline transparency and ESG standards. 

The asset manager's Sustainable Investing Open Access Initiative will provide a group of clients and academics access to its portal of investee company SDG scores, generated using its proprietary framework, reports sister site Investment Week.

Robeco's framework quantifies an investible company's contribution to the SDGs and is a method used for many of its client portfolios.

The framework assesses positive and negative SDG contributions within a portfolio and investigates the extent to which businesses positively or negatively impact each of the SDGs.

For years, data quality has been cited as one of the biggest challenges facing the sustainable investment community.

Robeco said in a statement that the industry "should work together" to both improve data and define standards:

"Robeco's commitment to a more sustainable world also means opening up its intellectual property to a broader audience to help clients make better informed sustainable decisions," the statement read.

It is actively seeking feedback on the data and plans to make other SI data and IP available to a broader set of stakeholders in due course.

Victor Verberk, CIO of fixed income and sustainability at Robeco, said: "Traditionally asset managers tend to protect intellectual property and use it to add value to their proprietary investment processes. Yet the massive challenges our planet is facing require a different approach.

"We need to join forces to address these challenges properly. By opening up our SDG data to a broader audience we aim to contribute to improving quality and standards setting across the industry."

Head of sustainable investing at Robeco, Carola Van Lamoen, added that the data will help the industry measure progress against sustainable objectives, lead on exposure to SDGs and implement robust reporting.

"By publishing our SDG scores we aim to enable academics to develop new insights," she added. "We therefore invite them to actively share their feedback on our SDG data and methodology."