Despite recent negative press surrounding ESG Data and Sustainability, the imperative to integrate responsible investment data throughout the investment lifecycle remains unchanged. The industry is moving away from fragmented, team-specific management of ESG portal access toward a more unified, firm-wide strategy that centralizes ESG data.

The Role of Security and Entity Mastering

To support this transition, it’s critical to embed company policies related to Security, Entity Management, and Corporate Structure. Doing so ensures that ESG data is not only accessible but also usable and aligned with broader organizational frameworks. Security and Entity Mastering functionality play pivotal roles in maintaining links between a firms Security Universe of Interest and ESG vendors via the client chosen Entity Master corporate structure framework. This approach ensures that investment firms have access to aligned and complete data sets for informed decision-making.

Additionally, firms recognize the importance of flexibility in data management and to provide the necessary support for internal users to override corporate structures and ESG datapoints. Mastering ESG datapoints, including both standardized factors, waterfall populations, custom scoring metrics and inheritance rules, are a core requirement of firms and requires not only aggregating ESG data but also implementing robust controls and lineage tracking mechanisms to ensure data accuracy and integrity.

The Shift Towards Centralized ESG Data

The delivery of mastered Security, Entity, and ESG data to a central cloud repository or Lakehouse environment represents a significant advancement in data accessibility and usability vs an existing deployed system with more regimented data models and technology. The tooling available within cloud-based repository enables front office users to leverage powerful exploration tools and easily scalable technology allowing for Adhoc quants modelling, universe screening and the creation of exclusion lists for example. Both technical users utilizing SQL and API queries, and business users benefit from the ease of access to predefined reports to facilitate data-driven decision-making across the organization.

To understand how Rimes are helping our clients navigate the complexities ESG data, please contact [email protected]