CSRHub Blog Research on ESG metrics and comments on sustainability best practice

CSRHub CTO and Co-Founder, Bahar Gidwani, will be speaking at the 2020 BattleFin Ensemble & Discovery Days event. The conference will take place virtually September 29th - 30th, 2020.  

BattleFin's panel lineup is broad and current, including discussions on the recovery of the travel industry, tech and consumer stock insights, macroeconomic trends, and even a panel focusing on the current election. 

The two-day conference aims to use alternative data insights to predict some of the changing impacts Covid-19 will have on Q3 earnings.

Bahar will take part in a roundtable discussion on the Institutional Investor's Perspective sponsored by AWS on Tuesday at 11:35am ET alongside executives from:

• Sentieo - Financial Research for a Market Edge
• American Century Investments - Leading Asset Management Firm
• Worldwide World Pensions Council - The Asset Owners' Think Tank

For the full agenda, a complete list of speakers, and the opportunity to register, click here.

Bahar Gidwani 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 offers one of the world’s broadest and most consistent set of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings, covering 20,000 companies. Its 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. For more information, visit www.CSRHub.com. CSRHub is a B Corporation.

An article in today's Wall Street Journal surprised me with a poll that showed American voters trust big business even less than they trust members of Congress.  Banks (treated as a separate category by the Gallup pollsters who did this work) have zoomed downward in trust terms since 2006, and are now just a smidge above Congress.  The Supreme Court was the last party mentioned--and its trustworthiness seems to be rising.

To put a number on things, about 18% of voters felt big businesses could be trusted--down from about 25% in 1990.  I don't know where lawyers and used car salespeople would rank...but it couldn't be much worse.  I suspect that a series of big-business-bashing movies have reinforced these feelings and concerns.  And events such as the oil spill in the Gulf and the coal mine disaster in West Virginia don't help.

Interestingly, it seems to me that businesses are acting much more responsibly than they did 20 years ago.  We certainly see a growing interest in the corporate social responsibility issues we track at CSRHUB.  More than 8,000 companies report now on their CSR performance--and they can't all be lying!  The Web (and tools like ours) are bringing transparency and visibility that helps hold companies responsible when they do wrong.  I hope that soon the many companies who are doing good will also start to earn the trust they deserve, for the positive actions they are taking.