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MJ Hudson
MJ Hudson, the specialist service provider to the asset management industry, today announces the release of ESG Advantage, a unique digital solution that helps private market participants understand how they and their investments measure up from an ESG (environmental, social, and governance) perspective.
Institutional investors, fund managers and portfolio company management teams must comply with challenging regulatory requirements and satisfy increasing scrutiny on ESG and sustainability. ESG regulations are often complex, constituting thousands of pages of rules, making it extremely difficult to meet the deadlines set. The amount of data that must be collected and the number of disclosures that must be made continue to grow.
For fund managers, failure to comply with EU ESG regulations (such as the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (‘SFDR’), which came into force in March, or the EU Taxonomy, timetabled for January 2022) will make it difficult to market funds to EU-based investors.
For institutional investors, beneficiary and stakeholder scrutiny has made ESG and sustainability a top priority and one where inadequate reporting is becoming unacceptable.
ESG Advantage, which is built on MJ Hudson’s Advantage IQ platform, guides users through the assessment process in a step-by-step fashion, tracking important data and automating analysis and reporting. Following a successful and award-winning1 pilot phase, ESG Advantage is now available to fund managers, institutional investors and other private market participants.
Commenting on the release, MJ Hudson CEO, Matthew Hudson, said: “As the demands on private market firms increase and ESG frameworks, regulations and standards increase day-by-day, the need to simplify and streamline ESG data collection and assessment is paramount. In Europe, the confusion surrounding impending SFDR requirements also ups the pressure on the asset management industry to fully integrate ESG. Designed specifically for private markets strategies, ESG Advantage streamlines the entire assessment and reporting process. It is important for the asset management industry to shine a strong light and create transparency and honesty into their hard work to build more sustainable funds and portfolio companies.
ESG Advantage is built into our end-to-end suite of asset management products and tools available from our proprietary data and analytics platform, Advantage IQ.”
For more than 10 years, MJ Hudson has helped clients develop responsible investment policies, implement these throughout the investment life cycle and create shareholder value by tackling ESG risks and opportunities within underlying investments. ESG Advantage was developed by this team of ESG experts, who are on hand to provide tailored advisory services, as required. ESG Advantage harnesses the best of MJ Hudson’s methodologies, industry frameworks and regulatory standards into a single platform to help clients determine what is most relevant and ensure compliance with existing and emerging regulations and standards, such as SFDR, EU Taxonomy, TCFD (Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures), and SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).
Emma Bickerstaffe, Director of ESG and product lead for ESG Advantage, commented: “As well as having a comprehensive knowledge of ESG regulations, we understand the practical challenges of data collection and analysis in private markets. This has allowed us to build a solution that drastically reduces the time and effort required to perform ESG assessments at the fund manager, portfolio and underlying company level. ESG Advantage is sophisticated and extremely powerful, but it is also efficient and easy to use.”
ESG Advantage is available now, on a subscription basis.
To learn more or book a demonstration, please visit www.esg-advantage.com
