Categories: OLD Media Moves

Bloomberg and corporate responsibility data

Paul Tullis of Fast Company writes about the initiative to add environmental sustainability data of companies to the Bloomberg terminal.

Tullis writes, “Ravenel used this kind of argument to persuade Bloomberg to add ESG data to its terminals. His team spent countless hours assembling and entering data into the system (often by hand) before going live in July 2009. Today, when Bloomberg’s 300,000 market-savvy customers turn on their terminals in the morning, they can see ESG data such as greenhouse-gas intensity per sales, water usage, employee fatalities, toxic discharge, and more than 100 other indicators as part of their basic package alongside the rest of the Wall Street alphabet soup. (The ESG data does not cost extra.)

“And investors are using it: In the second half of 2010, 5,000 unique customers in 29 countries accessed more than 50 million ESG indicators via Bloomberg’s screens — a 29% increase over the first half of last year. ‘We expect that trend to continue,’ Ravenel says.

“Recently, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse launched divisions to analyze ESG data from Bloomberg and its ESG competitors. (A number of these competitors have bought one another or merged in the wake of Bloomberg’s entry into the field.) ‘We feel there’s enough quality data out there now that we place it on our platform in a variety of ways and from a variety of different vendors,’ says Bruce Kahn, senior investment analyst of Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors.

“To Ravenel, this is not only a business success but also potentially an environmental one, because what’s measured gets managed. If analysts are paying attention to ExxonMobil’s carbon-dioxide use, then the company may try to reduce its emissions — and maybe create a product that enables other companies to reduce their emissions. ‘I saw the potential for us to have an impact exponential to what we’d been doing on the operating side with making Bloomberg greener,’ Ravenel says. ‘This would dwarf anything we could do to reduce our footprint.'”