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

CSRHub is pleased to announce that it is now integrating data from Arabesque S-Rayâ into its consensus ratings. Using quantitative data techniques and a rules-based approach, Arabesque S-Ray provides technology that is used by some of the world’s largest investors, corporations and consultancies to assess the sustainability performance of listed companies globally. S-Ray data will now directly contribute to CSRHub’s sustainability analysis of more than 7,000 companies, and will enhance the ratings for all 36,000 companies that CSRHub covers.

Arabesque S-Ray systematically combines over 250 ESG long-term metrics with news and NGO signals from over 30,000 sources to provide dynamic and responsive scores. Covering over 85% of global market cap and drawing from over four million ESG data points daily, S-Ray utilises an ever-expanding and diverse range of data to create quantitative metrics for the assessment of corporate performance.

The chart below compares the S-Ray ESG Score of 6,263 companies with CSRHub’s own ratings, captured on 1 December, 2019. The data shows a rating correlation of 58%, which is particularly striking given that CSRHub’s ratings were published two months after those of S-Ray, and highlights the effectiveness of S-Ray’s daily scoring approach.

Arabesque S-Ray joins other major ESG data and ratings providers who supply data to CSRHub, such as MSCI, Vigeo Eiris, ISS, and S&P Trucost. Each of these providers offers a unique perspective on the ESG performance of the companies they cover—perspectives that CSRHub combines with crowd, non-profit organization, and government datasets to create its consensus rating.

Todd Arthur Bridges, Global Head of Sustainable Investing and ESG Research at Arabesque S-Ray, said; “CSRHub is a truly unique company that knows the importance of systems-level thinking, and has brought the sustainable finance ecosystem together in a systematic way through their Consensus Ratings. Information is critical to well-functioning and efficient markets, and the leadership team of CSRHub has been able to break down the ESG paywalls across commercial organizations to help innovate and advance progress. The CSR Ratings and Rankings are well designed and allow for proper ESG consensus calibration – which can easily be understood by many users across the sustainable finance stakeholder community. Arabesque S-Ray is proud to be part of CSRHub and their mission.”

Bahar Gidwani, Cofounder and CTO at CSRHub said; “We were very pleased when our analysis showed that our methodology and results were closely aligned with those of S-Ray. S-Ray data appears to offer a current and forward-looking view of company ESG performance that matches well with CSRHub’s backward looking perspective.  By combining our work, investors and other researchers may be able to better understand and predict how perception of company ESG ratings will change.”

About CSRHub

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.

About Arabesque S-Ray GmbH

S-Ray® is a leading analytics tool developed by Arabesque that assesses the sustainability performance of over 7,000 listed corporations using self-learning quantitative models and data scores. The technology systematically combines over 250 ESG metrics with news signals from over 30,000 sources across 170 countries. It is the first tool of its kind to rate companies on the normative principles of the United Nations Global Compact (GC Score). Additionally, S-Ray provides an industry-specific assessment of companies' performance on financially material sustainability criteria (ESG Score), together with an assessment of how companies report their emissions (Temperature™ Score). These scores are combined with a preferences filter that assesses a company's business involvements. S-Ray daily data products and services are used by some of the world's leading financial institutions, investors, corporations and consultants.

By Bahar Gidwani

Part 2 of a 2-part series

The first part of this post described the reasons iCompli and CSRHub decided to create the new ESG Metrics Brief report.  We thought it might be helpful to provide a concrete example of the kinds of information—and opportunities for action—that these reports create.

At number 8 on the 2014 Fortune list, Ford is a well-studied, multinational with a long history of interest in sustainability.  Ford has reported to the GRI since 2007, to CDP since 2006, and has won many awards and recognitions.  CSRHub has 139 different sources of information on Ford and 22,501 different ratings points.  Ford’s overall CSRHub rating of 60 puts it at the 71% percentile among the 118 motor vehicle manufacturers that CSRHub tracks.

The overview

The first chart in Ford’s ESG Metrics Brief provides a visual representation of this relative performance:

While overall performance is well above average, it is clear that of the four major categories of sustainability performance that CSRHub tracks, Ford is strongest in “employees” and weakest in “governance.”

The ESG Metrics Brief has access to CSRHub’s eight years of ratings history and a similar range of history from Bloomberg.  This chart shows how Ford’s CSRHub rating has changed over this time period.

The ESG Metrics Brief next brings in other ESG sources from Bloomberg’s system.  Here is the relative performance for Ford as seen by ISS and by CDP.

Drilling down

After a user has reviewed the overall situation for a company, he or she can “drill down” into each of the four main categories that CSRHub covers.  For instance, here is the change over time for Ford’s governance rating, compared to those of its peers.

The above chart uses CSRHub ratings.  Other sources and metrics drawn from Bloomberg help further explain Ford’s loss of competitive advantage compared to its peers in this area.  One factor may be a reduction in the amount and quality of Ford’s disclosures.

A second factor could be the perception that Ford’s CEO compensation is out of line with that of its peers.

Bloomberg tracks a wide array of metrics and policies that give users of the ESG Metrics Brief even more insight into this part of Ford’s sustainability behavior.

The bottom line

We believe that an ESG Metrics Brief will be a good starting point for those who want to understand one company’s sustainability performance.

• The report is easy to obtain.  It takes three business days or less to generate each report.
• The report is inexpensive.  Each report costs only $495—much less than the time and energy required for most researchers to generate something comparable, and far less than the cost to license the datasets.
• The report is broad and comprehensive.  You get data on more than 120 indicators across all areas of sustainability.  Each report normally compares against between 10 and 30 peers.
• The report helps inform the stakeholders in a sustainability strategy process.  You can share the report internally and help prove your case for new programs, further investments, and shifts in strategy.

We have more data than we can ever fit into any single report!  We look forward to getting feedback from our users about the ESG Metrics Brief and continuing to fine-tune it to meet their needs.

See more now, including a full sample, at  http://www.csrhub.com/content/icompli-csrhub-esg-metrics-brief/.

Bahar Gidwani is CEO and Co-founder of CSRHub.  He has built and run large technology-based businesses for many years. Bahar holds a CFA, worked on Wall Street with Kidder, Peabody, and with McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to a number of major companies and currently serves on the board of several software and Web companies. 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 provides access to the world’s largest corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings and information.  It covers over 15,000 companies from 135 industries in 132 countries. By aggregating and normalizing the information from 400 data sources, CSRHub has created a broad, consistent rating system and a searchable database that links millions of rating elements back to their source. Managers, researchers and activists use CSRHub to benchmark company performance, learn how stakeholders evaluate company CSR practices, and seek ways to improve corporate sustainability performance.

By Bahar Gidwani

Part 1 of a 2-part series

Sustainability professionals spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of time developing and managing their sustainability programs.  Most dread the almost inevitable question from their manager or their manager’s manager—”How are we performing relative to our peers?  Where are we doing well and where do we need to improve?”  The iCompli CSRHub ESG Metrics Brief is designed to make it easy to answer these questions in a fact-based and authoritative way.

Why has it been hard to get answers?

Sustainability managers know their own programs—and understand the data they generate and report.  However, hundreds of outside sources each form their own opinions on a company’s sustainability performance.  They use different criteria and come to different conclusions—and both their analysis methods and their viewpoints are not always readily available.

For instance, is Wal-Mart more socially responsible than Target?  The barriers to answering this question include:

• Too much information – CSRHub contains 131 sources of sustainability information for Wal-Mart and 118 sources for Target.
• Gaps in the data - 85 of the above data sources rate both company, but many sources are unique to only one of the two companies.
• Broad range of comparable companies – CSRHub tracks 274 retail companies worldwide.  To fairly compare Wal-Mart and Target, one needs to put them into context against all of these other competitors.

Our new solution required combining two components

CSRHub’s database system maps, merges, and normalizes sustainability ratings from 425 sources.  It includes information from Wall Street firms such as Thomson, MSCI, EIRIS, and Trucost; data from non-governmental organizations such as CDP, GRI, Transparency.org and the UN Global Compact, and information from government databases, publications, and various types of certification and crowd sources.  By combining almost 80 million pieces of data, CSRHub can generate objective scores of the perceived sustainability performance for more than 15,000 companies in 132 countries.

The end result shows that Target is generally more sustainable than Wal-Mart—although Wal-Mart is seen has having better performance on environmental issues.

This perception perspective helps identify where a particular company is weak or strong.  But, most corporate managers need to also see comparable sets of facts and figures, before they can invest in new projects or change their strategy.  The new ESG Metrics Brief combines CSRHub’s insights with the hard facts contained in Bloomberg’s well-respected ESG (Environment Social Governance) Database.

Bloomberg tracks data on more than 30,000 publicly-traded companies, from around the world.  Its data set includes information not only hundreds of data items its own staff gathers from public sources and company filings but also data from other major ESG sources such as Sustainalytics and ISS.  The result is a set of comprehensive reports on 6,969 companies in 77 countries.

Look for part 2 of this series to see a concrete example of the kinds of information—and opportunities for action—that the new ESG Metrics Brief's create.

To see more now, including a full sample, go to www.csrhub.com/content/icompli-csrhub-esg-metrics-brief/.

Bahar Gidwani is CEO and Co-founder of CSRHub.  He has built and run large technology-based businesses for many years. Bahar holds a CFA, worked on Wall Street with Kidder, Peabody, and with McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to a number of major companies and currently serves on the board of several software and Web companies. 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 provides access to the world’s largest corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings and information.  It covers over 15,000 companies from 135 industries in 132 countries. By aggregating and normalizing the information from 400 data sources, CSRHub has created a broad, consistent rating system and a searchable database that links millions of rating elements back to their source. Managers, researchers and activists use CSRHub to benchmark company performance, learn how stakeholders evaluate company CSR practices, and seek ways to improve corporate sustainability performance.

As previously seen in the WiznessBlog.

Wizness and CSRHub have joined forces to simplify sustainability benchmarking against competitors. CSRHub co-founder Cynthia Figge answered questions about her company and how the new benchmarking product will benefit users.

Q: What is CSRHub’s goal and purpose?

A:  CSRHub aggregates information about corporate social performance into one place so companies and individuals can track sustainability worldwide. It’s the first easy way to discover how companies perform and compare on sustainability and CSR issues.

Q: What was the genesis of CSRHub?

A: My partner Bahar Gidwani and I founded CSRHub in 2007 to solve the CSR data problem. Back then, there were many often conflicting data sources – sound familiar? We were the first company to recognize that the growing body of CSR information would soon require a Big Data solution. We figured out how to combine the data into a single rating that incorporates an ever-growing number of sources. We started with the premier environment, social, governance, the ESG firms, also known as socially responsible investment or SRI — we aggregate nine now — and added data from 300 sources so far and counting, NGOs plus government agencies, social networking groups, indexes and publishers. Our proprietary tools combine more than 60 million pieces of data on sustainability and CSR performance into a consistent set of ratings.

Q: Who are CSRHub major ESG/SRI data sources?

A: Our sources include premier ESG organizations ASSET4 (Thomson Reuters), CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project), EIRIS, GovernanceMetrics International, IW Financial, MSCI (ESG Intangible Value Assessment and ESG Impact Monitor), RepRisk, Trucost and Vigeo.

Q: What is the CSRHub schema?

A: Our data schema lays it out in detail, but generally our ratings are based on four categories: Environment, Employees, Community, and Governance. Each category has three subcategories. For example, within the Environment category there are Environmental Policy and Reporting, Energy and Climate Change, Resource Management. For Employees, Diversity and Labor Rights, Compensation and Benefits, Training Health and Safety, and so on.

Q: How are people using CSRHub ratings?

A: The market uses us for six applications:

First, for benchmarking. Our ratings and analysis tool covers 9,296 companies across 135 industries to track competitors over time.

A lot of our users analyze performance by stakeholder for CSR and Sustainability Reports. We offer a, single powerful interface to over 348 sources of information.

Professors and students conduct academic research and projects. Our tool analyzes six years of data and over 60 million data points, and is currently used in hundreds of universities globally.

Sustainability is increasingly important to company brand. Companies use us to build authentic brand values and increase customer loyalty.

CSRHub is used to build a world-class sustainable supply chain. Our APIs can map into a company’s supply chain network across 106 countries.

Finally, we find that sustainability performance is increasingly a factor in economic decisions. People search for places to work, brands to buy, and partners to support based on their values.

Q: How does CSRHub enable comparisons between companies? Can we really integrate apples and oranges?

A: The CSRHub schema maps data elements from all these data sources into the twelve subcategories, then aggregates and normalizes the data for comparability. The schema isn’t unique, but the aggregation and normalizing absolutely is. Bahar and I together had the perfect skillset to attack this challenge. We met at Harvard Business School. I went on to cofound EKOS International, one of the first consultancies to integrate sustainability and corporate strategy, way back in 1996 if you can believe it. Bahar has a CFA and built and ran Web-based and technology-based businesses on Wall Street with Kidder, Peabody and for McKinsey.

Q: Why is knowing my CSRHub rating and ranking in my industry important?

A: Benchmarking is key to competing successfully and creating value. Knowing your CSRHub rating and ranking enables your company to gain an independent perspective about how well you perform compared to other companies, identify specific areas for improvement, and monitor company CSR performance over time. Integrating CSRHub benchmarking across divisions enables a company to prioritize improvements and provide greater transparency of progress.

Q: How will CSRHub and Wizness work together?

A: CSRHub and Wizness are collaborating to create a Benchmark Template Report available on the Wizness Publisher website. Our reports will be streamlined, digital, social and mobile solutions for key stakeholders interested in sustainability data and progress.

Q: When will this benchmarking tool be available?

A: An early preview of the report is available now in PDF form at the following address: https://publisher.wizness.com/csrhub

“Photo courtesy of Wizness.”

CSRHub provides access to corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings and information on 9,200+ companies from 135 industries in 106 countries. By aggregating and normalizing the information from 348 data sources, CSRHub has created a broad, consistent rating system and a searchable database that links millions of rating elements back to their source. Managers, researchers and activists use CSRHub to benchmark company performance, learn how stakeholders evaluate company CSR practices and seek ways to change the world.

The following is part 2 of a 3-part series on “Big Data.”

By Bahar Gidwani

We have previously defined “Big Data” and shown how we feel a Big Data system built by CSRHub could help address some problems that exist in collecting corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability data on companies.  We have also further described the problems with the currently dominant method of gathering this data—an analyst-based method.

CSRHub uses input from investor-driven sources (known as “ESG” for Environment, Social, and Governance or “SRI” for Socially Responsible Investment), non-governmental organizations, government organizations, and “crowd sources” to construct a 360 degree view of a company’s sustainability performance.

The illustration below shows the steps in our process.

The steps are:

•  Convert measurement from each data source into a 0 (low) to 100 (high) scales.  This  requires understanding how each source evaluates company performance.
•  We next connect each rating element with one or more of our twelve subcategory  ratings.  (Some elements may also map partially or exclusively to special issues such as  animal testing, fracking, or nuclear power.)
•  We compare each source’s ratings with those for all other sources.  Each company we  study gives us more opportunities to compare one source’s ratings with another.  The  total number of comparisons possible is very large and growing, exponentially.  We  use the results of our comparison to adjust the distribution of scores for each rating  source so that they fall into a “beta” distribution that has a central peak around 50.
•  Some sources match up well with all of our other data.  Some sources don’t line up.  We add weight to those who match well but continue to “count” those who don’t.

We then repeat steps A to D as many times until we have found a “best fit” for the available data.  Each time we add a new source, we go through an initial mapping, normalization, and weighting process.

An Example

It may help explain our data analysis process by using a specific example.  Hewlett Packard is a heavily tracked company.  We have 154 sources of data for this company that together provide 17,571 individual data elements.  Only 62 of these data sources provided data for our July 1, 2014 rating—the rest of the data sources provided data for previous periods (our data set goes back to 2008).  The 62 current data sources provided 575 different types of rating elements and a total of 610 different ratings values that do not affect/apply to special issues.

After their conversion to our 0 to 100 scale, we map the rating elements into our twelve subcategories.  We now have 1,403 ratings factors.  We selected our subcategories to allow an even spread of data across them. You can see that we have a reasonably even spread for Hewlett Packard:

Before we can present a rating, we need to check first that we have enough sources and enough “weight” from the sources we have, to generate a good score.  In general, we require at least two sources that have good strength or three or four weaker ones, before we offer a rating.  As you can see, we have plenty of sources to rate a big company such as HP.

Even after normalization, the curve of ratings for any one subcategory may have a lot of irregularities.  However, we have enough data to provide a good estimate of the midpoint of the available data, for those ratings we report.  Below you can see that some sources have a high opinion of HP’s board while others have a less favorable view.  The result is a blended score that averages to less than the more uniform Leadership Ethics rating.

The overall effect of our process is to smooth out the ratings input and make them more consistent.  As you can see in the illustration below, the final ratings distribution is organized well around a central peak.  The average overall rating of 64 is below the peak, which is around 80.  The original average rating was 61.

By making a few assumptions about how the errors in data are distributed, one can assess the accuracy of ratings.  In a previous post, we showed that CSRHub’s overall rating accurately represents the values that underlie it to within 1.8 points at a 95% confidence interval.

In our next post, we will discuss the benefits and drawback of using this complex and data intensive approach to measuring company CSR performance.

See part 1, Using “Big Data” to Rate Corporate Social Responsibility: One Company’s Approach.

Bahar Gidwani is CEO and Co-founder of CSRHub.  He has built and run large technology-based businesses for many years. Bahar holds a CFA, worked on Wall Street with Kidder, Peabody, and with McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to a number of major companies and currently serves on the board of several software and Web companies. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy. Bahar is a member of the SASB Advisory Board.  He plays bridge, races sailboats, and is based in New York City.

CSRHub provides access to corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings and information on 9,200+ companies from 135 industries in 106 countries. By aggregating and normalizing the information from 348 data sources, CSRHub has created a broad, consistent rating system and a searchable database that links millions of rating elements back to their source. Managers, researchers and activists use CSRHub to benchmark company performance, learn how stakeholders evaluate company CSR practices and seek ways to change the world.