William Cox

Blue-chip companies spend big bucks on social programs. Apple, for example, recently increased its budget for its diversity program alone from $100 mn to $200 mn, while Mercedes Group spent €97 mn ($104 mn) on training in 2023, up from €93 mn the year before. The areas normally included under the S pillar of ESG are quite broad and people-oriented, but can be divided into company internal and external projects. Internal Cyber-security Diversity Ethics Health & safety Human rights Innovation Recruiting Supply chains Training: sales, technical External Communities Customers Marketing, communications Products R&D But while all of these areas have some…

Recently, the head of ESG at a blue-chip asset manager that is paying more than $200,000 annually for ESG data told me: ‘Once we get this ton of data from a major data provider, our work just begins. We have to make some financial sense of it.’ His remark points to a fundamental problem with ESG data and the $50 tn ESG investment market: there are too many indicators and too much non-actionable data. For an investor, knowing how many tons of greenhouse gases a company emits annually says little, if anything, about its performance, for example. In a recent…