Fitch Group’s sustainability-focused analytics business Sustainable Fitch announced today the launch of its ESG Ratings for global labelled structured bonds and covered bonds, expanding its dataset to over $100 billion in labelled structured bonds.

The announcement expands upon the company’s launch earlier this year of its ESG ratings product, ESG Ratings, Data & Analysis, adding a dataset of over $100 billion in labelled structured bonds to its initial set of $500 billion of labelled and KPI-linked instruments.

The product includes Entity Ratings, which evaluate entities’ positive and negative impact on the environment and society, based on underlying business activities, strategy, targets, policies and procedures, and governance; Framework Ratings, evaluating use of proceeds, KPIs, and overall framework strength and governance, and; Instrument Ratings, which integrate the entity and framework-level scores, allowing for comparisons between instruments across sectors, geographies and labelling frameworks.

With today’s announcement, the company will provide ratings for covered bonds, and framework and instrument ratings for ABS bonds, with ratings across sectors including RMBS, CMBS, solar ABS, auto ABS, consumer ABS and utilities ABS.

Mike Simonton, Head of Sustainable Fitch, said:

“Sustainable Fitch was launched with a goal of both listening to investors and providing products that offer a comprehensive assessment of ESG fundamentals. The expansion of Sustainable Fitch’s ESG Ratings to global labelled structured bonds and covered bonds meets a critical market demand. Our ESG data and analysis combined with ESG Ratings provide investors with the necessary tools to evaluate ESG impact, outcome and performance at a detailed individual factor level.”