CSRHub LLC recognized as a “Best For The World” B Corp^TM for creating powerful corporate governance structures to protect company mission

KATONAH, NEW YORK; September 4, 2019 – CSRHub LLC, a Certified B Corporation, has been named a Best For The World honoree in recognition of their significant positive impact in their innovative governance structures to protect the mission of their business. Ranking in the top 10% of all B Corps for their governance impact, CSRHub earned this honor because of their overall mission, ethics, accountability, and transparency.

Best For The World recognition is administered by B Lab, the global nonprofit that certifies and supports Certified B Corporations, which are for-profit companies dedicated to using business as a force for good. Today there are 3,000 Certified B Corporations across 64 countries and 150 industries, unified by one common goal: to redefine success in business.

B Corps meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. B Corp Certification doesn’t just evaluate a product or service, it assesses the overall positive impact of the company that stands behind it—like CSRHub. Using the B Impact Assessment, B Lab evaluates how a company’s operations and business model impact its workers, community, environment, and customers. To achieve the B Corp Certification, a company must achieve a score of at least 80 points on the assessment.

“We’re incredibly proud of this year’s Best For The World honorees,” says Anthea Kelsick, Chief Marketing Officer of B Lab. “These inspiring companies represent the kinds of business models and impact-driven business strategies that are building a new economy—one that is inclusive, regenerative, and delivers value to all stakeholders, not just shareholders. To that end, B Corps like CSRHub are redefining capitalism and showing that it actually can work for everyone.”

“We are honored to be recognized by B Lab for this achievement. We are proud to be a part of these world changing companies,” says Cynthia Figge, CEO and Cofounder of CSRHub.

1,000 B Corps from 44 countries were named to the 2019 Best For The World lists, including Patagonia, Beautycounter, Dr. Bronner’s, TOMS, Seventh Generation, and Greyston Bakery. The 2019 Best For The World honorees are determined based on the verified B Impact Assessments of Certified B Corporations. The full lists are available on https://bcorporation.net/. 

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About CSRHub: CSRHub offers one of the world’s broadest and most consistent set of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings, covering 18,000 companies. Its patented Big Data algorithm combines millions of data points on ESG performance from hundreds of sources, including leading ESG analyst raters, to produce consensus scores on all aspects of corporate social responsibility and sustainability. CSRHub ratings can be used to drive corporate, investor and consumer decisions. CSRHub has been a Certified B Corporation since November of 2010. For more information, visit www.csrhub.com.

Contact: Cynthia Figge, CEO & co-founder; cynthia@csrhub.com

About B Lab: B Lab is a nonprofit that serves a global movement of people using business as a force for good. B Lab’s initiatives include B Corp Certification, administration of the B Impact Management programs and software, and advocacy for governance structures like the benefit corporation. B Lab’s vision is of an inclusive and sustainable economy that creates a shared prosperity for all. To date, there are 3,000 Certified B Corps in over 150 industries and 64 countries, and over 50,000 companies use the B Impact Assessment. For more information, visit https://bcorporation.net/

B Lab Contact: Hannah Munger; Manager, PR & Communications; hmunger@bcorporation.net; +1 212-608-4150

ESG content set available for evaluation and testing beginning June 27, 2019

June 27, 2019

CSRHub, one of the world’s broadest and most consistent sets of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings, is pleased to offer ESG Business Intelligence data via the Open:FactSet Marketplace. It will be available for evaluation via FactSet’s cloud-based Data Evaluation platform on June 27, 2019.

“Launching CSRHub’s ESG Business Intelligence Data on the Open:FactSet Marketplace allows us to greatly expand our reach in keeping with our mission to empower stakeholders with easy to use consensus ratings to help improve sustainability performance worldwide,” said Cynthia Figge, CEO and Co-founder of CSRHub.

“CSRHub is an excellent addition to the Open:FactSet Marketplace’s network of providers,” says Lauren Stevens, Senior Vice President, Open:FactSet Strategy, FactSet. “ESG data is in strong demand among investment managers, and this new offering gives our clients another dataset to leverage when managing risk and looking for new investment opportunities.”

CSRHub data helps investors, corporations, and consumers integrate ESG and sustainability into their decision-making processes. Using a patented algorithm that aggregates and harmonizes disparate data from over 600 ESG sources, CSRHub generates a consensus score for the ESG performance of more than 18,000 companies from 136 industries in 139 countries. Data from CSRHub’s big data process can be used to increase corporate market value, uncover portfolio opportunities and risks, and integrate ESG trends into other Business Intelligence data sets. For instance, CSRHub’s ESG signal can:

• Identify risks and opportunities. CSRHub ratings represent the consensus opinion of a company’s ESG performance. Asset owners, portfolio managers, and investment analysts can compare their own assessment of a company against the CSRHub consensus and build alpha-creating strategies. CSRHub’s score is also used for screening potential investments and for examining the social impact of an existing portfolio.
• Benchmark corporate ESG performance. Companies can compare their CSRHub rating to those of their peers or competitors using CSRHub’s broad industry and geographic coverage. Through these comparisons, managers can build strategies to improve upon existing practices, plan new sustainability-related programs and reporting, better manage their stakeholders’ perception of corporate values and social impact, and evaluate their brand’s CSR performance.
• Backtest theories about ESG behavior. CSRHub offers monthly data back to 2008. Because CSRHub ratings are based on millions of data items drawn from hundreds of sources, they are stable, fit into a smooth distribution, and correlate well with other indicators. CSRHub ratings are used by hundreds of universities and have been cited in many publications.

CSRHub’s ESG Business Intelligence data feed is now available as an evaluation feed on the Open:FactSet Marketplace (OFM).

For more information and to get started, see https://open.factset.com/products/csrhub-esg-business-intelligence/en-us.

About CSRHub

CSRHub offers one of the world’s broadest and most consistent set of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings, covering 18,000 companies. Its patented Big Data algorithm combines millions of data points on ESG performance from hundreds of sources, including leading ESG analyst raters, to produce consensus scores on all aspects of corporate social responsibility and sustainability. CSRHub ratings can be used to drive corporate, investor and consumer decisions.

CSRHub
Media: Cynthia Figge
cynthia@csrhub.com

Do bigger companies get better ESG ratings than small ones?  We believe the answer is “no.”  This seems true across a wide range of companies, whether one measures size by revenue or by market capitalization (a proxy for enterprise value).  Our result indicates that small companies can and should expect to be able to equal or outperform their bigger rivals on environment, social, and governance (ESG) issues.

A comparison of charts from our new Bloomberg app (ESGHub) indicates that big companies disclose more information than small ones.  The chart on the left shows the distribution of disclosure for the S&P 500 Index.  There is a wide dispersion of disclosure profiles (as measured by Bloomberg’s ESG Metrics on the bottom axis) and CSRHub’s consensus ESG rating (as shown on the vertical axis).  The chart on the right shows about 1,500 companies from the NASDAQ 3,000.  There are some companies spread out on the right.  However, many companies are clustered to the left with low disclosure scores.

Even though the smaller companies are hard to distinguish based on their disclosure, they do separate on the vertical axis (aggregate ESG rating).  The left-right distinction does not appear to be related to size.  As you can see below, larger companies have only a small tendency towards higher disclosure ratings from Bloomberg.

The aggregate ESG ratings from CSRHub also do not appear to be driven by either revenue (left chart below) or market capitalization (right chart below).  This pattern has been stable for at least the past five years.  One theory is that the sustainability story of smaller companies may be simpler and easier to tell than those for large ones.  Smaller companies may also appear more credible on ESG issues, due to cultural biases against “big business.”

Bahar Gidwani is CTO and Co-founder of CSRHub. Bahar has built and run large technology-based businesses for many years. Bahar holds a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) and was one of the first people to receive the FSA (Fundamentals of Sustainability Accounting) designation from SASB. Bahar worked on Wall Street with Kidder, Peabody, and with McKinsey & Co. He has founded several technology-based companies and is a co-founder of CSRHub, the world’s broadest source of corporate social responsibility information. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy. He plays bridge, races sailboats, and is based in New York City.

CSRHub is the largest ESG and sustainability rating and information platform globally. We aggregate 204 million data points from 634 data sources including 10 leading ESG analyst databases. Our patented algorithm aggregates, normalizes, and weights data to rate 18,000 companies in 139 countries across 134 industries. We track 97% of world market capitalization. We cover 12 subcategories of ratings and rankings across the categories of environment, employees, community and governance. We show underlying data sources that contribute to each subcategory’s ratings. CSRHub metrics are a consensus view (any 2 sources may have about a 30% correlation so we make sense of the disparate data). We tag companies for their involvement in 17 Special Issues. We provide Macro-enabled Excel dashboard templates, customizable dashboards, and an API. Our big data technology enables 85% full coverage of data across our rated companies and robust analyses. We provide historical ratings back to 2008.

We recently reviewed the ESG coverage status for the 8,686 companies in the MSCI ACWI (All Country World Index).  The ACWI is a popular benchmark for many investors, because it includes approximately 85% of the global opportunities for equity investment.  We felt it would be useful to see how much ESG information is currently available on the companies on this type of broad index.

CSRHub aggregates ESG data from more than 600 sources.  Each source has a different coverage universe.  By combining these universes, we have been able to offer full or partial ratings on 18,000 companies and know that there is at least some information on another 13,000 companies.

As you can see from the table below, we have reached the point where there is CSRHub ESG data on 95% of the companies and 99% of the “weighted value” in the Index.  5,777 companies (81% of the index weight) have full CSRHub scores (overall rating and scores for Community, Employees, Environment, and Governance factors).  Another 1,116 companies (13%) have partial scores while 1,324 companies (15%) have some data, but not enough yet to allow calculation of a CSRHub rating.

We do not have data on the past components for this Index.  However, we can look at the status for the current companies over the past five years.  (CSRHub data reaches back to 2008.)  As you can see below, there has been a dramatic improvement in the number of companies with ESG data over this time period.

One benefit of this increase in coverage is that ESG ratings can now be extended to cover corporate bond and high-yield debt portfolios.  In a recent study of one such portfolio, we found full or partial ESG ratings in CSRHub on 1,681 of 1,789 holdings—94% coverage.  It remains difficult to put ESG scores on sovereign and municipal bond issues.  However, we have ratings now on many universities, cities, and states.  We may also be able to impute a rating for a locality, based on the ratings of the companies that are headquartered there.

One of the excuses made for not integrating ESG information into corporate or investor decision-making has been that there are too many gaps in ESG data.  It appears that the hard work of ESG sources around the world are gradually filling in these gaps so that we can create a consistent and holistic view of relative ESG performance for a wide range of entities.

Bahar Gidwani is CTO and Co-founder of CSRHub. Bahar has built and run large technology-based businesses for many years. Bahar holds a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) and was one of the first people to receive the FSA (Fundamentals of Sustainability Accounting) designation from SASB. Bahar worked on Wall Street with Kidder, Peabody, and with McKinsey & Co. He has founded several technology-based companies and is a co-founder of CSRHub, the world’s broadest source of corporate social responsibility information. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy. He plays bridge, races sailboats, and is based in New York City.

CSRHub is the largest ESG and sustainability rating and information platform globally. We aggregate 204 million data points from 634 data sources including 10 leading ESG analyst databases. Our patented algorithm aggregates, normalizes, and weights data to rate 18,000 companies in 139 countries across 134 industries. We track 97% of world market capitalization. We cover 12 subcategories of ratings and rankings across the categories of environment, employees, community and governance. We show underlying data sources that contribute to each subcategory’s ratings. CSRHub metrics are a consensus view (any 2 sources may have about a 30% correlation so we make sense of the disparate data). We tag companies for their involvement in 17 Special Issues. We provide Macro-enabled Excel dashboard templates, customizable dashboards, and an API. Our big data technology enables 85% full coverage of data across our rated companies and robust analyses. We provide historical ratings back to 2008.

Republished from Environmental Leader