Bloomberg, Refinitiv/Thompson Reuters, IHS Markit, FactSet, S&P, Moodys, MSCI… there is a long list of multi-billion-dollar vendors who sell market data, analytics, risk, reporting and pricing tools to professionals trying to value and manage portfolios of assets.

But what if the absence of granular ESG data meant that analysts were buying just 50% of what they needed to make investment decisions…Whether that number is 5%, 50% or 95% it points to an enormous opportunity for new vendors to become the torch bearers for Impact & ESG and help define the new standards we need to judge how a company is affecting society beyond the earnings it makes.

The number of data sources and authorities on quantifying ESG & Impact will continue to proliferate. We are drowning in data and, like in other areas of financial market data, we do not believe there will ever be just one score, data source or standard. This is especially true in a frontier space like ‘Impact’ as we begin to quantify new data points for the first time and incorporate them into company analysis. We believe there is a growing gap in the market for a provider like YvesBlue to pull together the disparate and growing number of ESG & Impact data sources (both internal and external) to present a detailed and consolidated view of the Impact characteristics of a portfolio.