Verisk Maplecroft has announced its delight in being named the Best Specialist ESG Ratings Provider at the ESG Investing Awards ceremony held at the Dilly Hotel in London on February 23rd.

The firm's Sovereign ESG Ratings have been honoured with an award in recognition of their ability to provide investors with the most comprehensive assessment of ESG risks and opportunities across the current and potential sovereign issuer universe.

The award recognises its commitment to offering a thorough picture of ESG factors that can influence investment decisions. Other finalists in the category included Scotiabank, Apex Group, and S&P Global Ratings.

The ESG Investing Awards 2023 are the only awards that evaluate and assess the best companies involved in all areas of ESG investing globally. These awards are exclusively designed for banks, investment managers, research houses, ratings agencies, index and ETF providers, and exchanges.

The awards were evaluated by a panel of independent judges consisting of financial market professionals, academics, and independent experts. The judges evaluated the nominees' contributions to ESG investing across different sectors and industries.

Their analysis of the sovereign ESG landscape, which presented research findings from their Sovereign ESG Ratings, earned the firm a finalist spot in the Best Specialist ESG Research category. The research highlighted the importance of ESG issues, including human rights, in relation to sovereign debt at various levels, demonstrating their materiality.

“This award is a testament to the fantastic work of our sustainable finance team and their dedication to helping sovereign ESG investors use geospatial data to develop a deep-set understanding of critical ESG issues that result in tangible and sustainable outcomes in government bond markets,” says Verisk Maplecroft President, Matt Moshiri. “Over the coming months, we will continue to refine, innovate, and release data solutions to ESG investors across sovereign debt and other asset classes, including equities, real estate, and commodities—watch this space.”

Verisk Maplecroft's Sovereign ESG Ratings, which have won awards, comprise six years of historical quarterly data and utilise approximately 350 of the company's 1200+ indicators across 37 separate issues and nine ESG dimensions. Their innovative methodology, which uses cluster analysis, more effectively captures the non-linear complexity of the sovereign ESG world than traditional weighted averages.

The Ratings data is derived exclusively from Verisk Maplecroft's wide-ranging collection of unstructured, geospatial, expert-derived, and structured sources. These sources go beyond the lagging datasets that have been traditionally used to monitor sovereign ESG issues. As a result, both the underlying data and the Ratings themselves are current, dynamic, and entirely free from government influence.

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Source: Verisk Maplecroft