Institutional Shareholder Services’ (ISS) responsible investment arm, ISS ESG announced today the launch of its new Regulatory Sustainable Investment Solution, aimed at enabling investment managers and other financial market participants to meet emerging regulatory disclosure requirements for sustainable investment products, such as the EU’s SFDR.

As financial markets companies introduce new investment products to meet the rapidly growing demand for ESG investing, regulators are developing new standards and requirements to define what constitutes a sustainable investment, and to help address concerns such as greenwashing. The EU’s Sustainable Financial Disclosure Requirement (SFDR), for example establishes disclosure requirements for funds that promote ESG characteristics (Article 8) or  have a sustainable investment objective (Article 9) including reporting on the specific sustainability objectives, indicators used to measure attainment of the objectives, consideration of principal adverse impacts on other sustainability objectives, and investment selection strategy, among several others.

According to ISS ESG, the new solution will help users meet SFDR reporting obligations for Article 8 and 9 labeled products, and will also cover emerging requirements from other jurisdictions, such as the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, India and the Philippines. The solution considers the common pillars for ESG reporting requirements, including financially material ESG risks, contribution to sustainability objectives, adverse sustainability impacts, and good governance. Users can define their interpretation of sustainable investments, and quantify the portion of funds, products and portfolios that meet those objectives.

Launching with a universe of over 12,000 corporate issuers, the new solution enables users to carry out company-level analysis, screen relevant sectors, and determine companies’ involvement in controversies, with assessments tailored to users’ selected sustainable finance themes and disclosure needs.

Till Jung, Managing Director and Global Head of ESG Products at ISS said:

“The challenge of navigating the complexities of the various emerging ESG disclosure rules and frameworks across the globe has now been made easier by our new solution, which packages together the most relevant ISS ESG data points for clients into one single dataset, to help address regulatory reporting requirements globally. This toolkit type solution is designed to make clients’ lives easier, as it facilitates the customization and implementation of an investor’s global sustainable investment strategy, and the optimization of their reporting.”