ESG & Sustainability

The idDAX 50 ESG NR Decrement 4.0% can be used to underlie structured products offering exposure to sustainability leaders in the German equity market. The decrement mechanism allows issuers to improve the coupon or capital-protection terms offered to clients.

How can investors push companies to have a more positive societal impact from their products and operations? And how can that impact be measured? Responsible Investor and Qontigo host a panel of experts who discuss these topics and more.

Variety in ESG data can enrich investment strategies and provide an edge in performance. Qontigo’s open-architecture approach is to find and leverage the most robust sustainability information available, with no limitation to any single provider, for each investing case.

Stocks fell in November, with indices reverting gains in the month’s last three sessions, as the emergence of the Omicron variant raised concerns the COVID-19 pandemic may continue to undermine the global economy.

Rebecca Chesworth, Senior Equities Strategist at State Street Global Advisors SPDR ETFs; and Hamish Seegopaul, Head of R&D for ESG and Quantitative Indices at Qontigo, discuss the change in underlying index for the SPDR® STOXX Europe 600 ESG Screened UCITS ETF and how clients’ ESG needs are shaping the product offering.

Sustainable investing strategies vary. Some investors, for example, simply want to improve ESG alignment. Others seek to maximize their impact on society, by investing in those companies that contribute the most to certain goals. While the metrics that underlie these approaches have some overlap, there is not perfect correlation, in terms of how metrics are defined, how portfolios are constructed, what is being targeted, etc.

Using the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework for an impact-measurement approach can help understand and quantify companies’ real-world impact, a new whitepaper from Qontigo and Clarity AI argues. Such an approach enables investors to bridge an important gap at a time when impact has emerged as a key investment pillar, right next to risk and returns.

This is the second in a series of Qontigo and Clarity AI research papers, which focuses on the challenge of measuring impact as a key means of bridging the gap between impact investment theory and practice.

A panel at COP26 comprised of sustainability and index experts, including members of Willis Towers Watson and Qontigo, explains how the STOXX Willis Towers Watson Climate Transition Indices (CTIs) help investors manage climate-transition risk and align their investments for the economic transition to net zero.

One of the panels at the Sustainability & Impact Investor Forum in Monaco last month drew from the perspectives of active fund management, asset-owner and indexing specialists, who discussed the key drivers and approaches to incorporate the transition to net zero into investment portfolios.

The diversity of sustainability priorities means there can be no one-size-fits-all approach to ESG ETF products, says Qontigo’s Anna Georgieva and Saumya Mehrotra

In this whitepaper, we show how portfolios can be built that provide more attractive sustainability characteristics – without taking on too much risk.