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Data Feed Tracks Companies’ Greenness

Environmentally-minded investors and asset managers can keep tabs on more than 1,000 U.S. companies' environmental friendliness and support for human rights.

Socially conscious investors and asset managers have a new way to access information about companies' track record on environmental friendliness and human rights. Sustainability research from IW Financial is now available as a data feed or on the IWF Workstation platform. The research was previously available exclusively through IW Financial's consulting group.

The IW Financial sustainability research currently covers more than 1,000 publicly traded U.S. companies and will grow to 3,000 by the end of the year. Among the eight issue categories included are Climate Change, Environmental Performance, Environmental Management, Workforce, and Human Rights, with each category supported by research on multiple data points. Among the environmentally focused data points are a measurement of total Green House Gas (GHG) emissions and GHG emissions by revenue; a calculation of total energy use and energy use by revenue; and a characterization of a company's overall climate change policy.

"We analyze a company's sustainability in a values-neutral way, focusing on disclosure, policy, and performance. The results data allows asset managers to compare the performance of individual companies to a benchmark or to their peers, and to invest accordingly," said Mark Bateman, IW Financial's director of research. "This set of data really demonstrates which companies are — and which companies aren't — pursuing sustainability."

Investors increasingly see sustainability as an important consideration, according to David Myers, director of the financial services laboratory at Lehigh University. "There is a growing body of research that points to the materiality of these factors," Myers said. "As more data is collected, I suspect that we'll be finding more relationships between these issues and shareholder value."

Glass, Lewis & Co., LLC, a leading independent research and global proxy advisory firm, was an early adopter of the IW Financial sustainability research, integrating the data into its Proxy Paper reports. "We've been impressed with the quality of the data and the value it adds for our clients," said Robert McCormick, chief policy officer at Glass Lewis. "This information is increasingly being seen by investors as an important consideration in their investment decisions."

By making its sustainability data available electronically, IW Financial allows IWF Workstation users to further leverage the platform's analytics. Non-IWF Workstation users can easily incorporate the data feed into their own analytical systems.

"We see investor demand for sustainability research continuing to accelerate," said Sam Pierce, chief executive officer at IW Financial. "We want to make our research available to investors in the format that is most useful to them."

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