SAN FRANCISCO/ACCESSWIRE/: Truvalue Labs, the pioneer in AI-driven environmental, social and governance (ESG) data, has been appointed by the UK’s Brunel Pension Partnership to evaluate the ESG and reputational risks across all Brunel’s managers and their holdings for listed equities and bonds.
Brunel was the first of the Local Government Pension Scheme, or LGPS, funds to become a signatory to the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Investing (PRI) and has, in partnership with its Client Funds, “embedded ESG considerations into all of its decision-making processes,” says Faith Ward, Chief Responsible Investment Officer, Brunel Pension Partnership. “Responsible investment is central to how Brunel fulfils its fiduciary duty.”
“We appoint managers that share the view that concentrating on the fundamental long-term performance of businesses, which includes the integration of risks, is most likely to deliver a successful long-term performance outcome.”
Of Truvalue Labs, Ward commented: “We like the objectivity of Truvalue Labs’ data that isn’t dependent upon what companies publish about themselves. Their timely material ESG data helps us to continually monitor the managers in our client partners funds and to evaluate and select new managers.”
“We are proud and excited to have been selected to work with Brunel, and to support the Partnership in its commitment to being 100% responsible investors,” said Sebastian Brinkmann, Managing Director for Truvalue Labs in Europe. “We look forward to working closely with Brunel in advancing ESG research and data for better long-term investments”.
Truvalue Labs leverages its powerful Truvalue AI™ engine to process vast amounts of data in seconds and score companies on key measures. For example, the Insight score ranks ESG behavior at a given point in time, and the Momentum score shows the company’s trajectory of ESG performance – whether it is improving or declining.
“It can be difficult to find data that captures the ups as well as the downsides, but Truvalue Labs covers both positive and negative aspects of companies’ ESG track records,” said Helen Price, Assistant Investment Officer at Brunel.
“We think that this combination of the long-term and momentum is a strength over other tools that may just be using a single rating,” Ward said. “We evaluated a number of providers on the market and concluded that Truvalue Labs had the tool we wanted as a primary source, both for communicating with managers and for evaluating the risks in our portfolios,” she concluded.