"A mega trend of our time is that people are interested in and driving what is happening to our money," Stephanie Clarke, senior vice president of Global Market Intelligence at Broadridge, tells MFWire. Broadridge Financial Solutions will add MSCI's ESG Fund Metrics Research to Broadridge's Global Market Intelligence platform, and this agreement is in response to the asset management industry's increasing interest in both sustainable investing and demand for more visibility on fund level ESG characteristics.

This agreement will provide to Broadridge's platform essential MSCI ESG Fund Metrics and insight into the underlying holdings on the environmental, social and governance qualities and characteristics of over 26,000 mutual funds and ETFs researched by MSCI ESG.

"People are increasingly caring about not only investment returns but on how the investments are made," says Clarke, and this agreement attempts to "give a standardized view across retail and institutional." This is especially true for millennials, who "are caring more about how their money is being handled."

Global Market Intelligence will incorporate MSCI ESG Research tracked funds' ESG quality scores, sustainable impact, carbon intensity metric and value alignment scores. This combination lets users explore fund level ESG characteristics throughout product categories, markets, active strategies, and passive strategies, and allows investment managers the capability to analyze and compare numerous products compared with size, flows and growth trajectory.

Clarke tells MFWire that "this tool measures funds for what they are saying they are doing as opposed to what they are actually doing" which helps create transparency.

The platform, for example, can be used to gather a geographic viewpoint where investors are given a product set and can compare how different countries are behaving. In addition to the traditional exclusionary factors and metrics, this tool helps investors align values with the mutual funds and ETFs they choose given the broad and comprehensive range of statistics such as carbon intensity and gender equality.

"Asset managers and investors are increasing their attention on sustainable, responsible and impact investing - demanding more details on fund level ESG factors to better inform their buying decisions," states Clarke in a press release. "By adding ESG factors to our platform, we are responding to our clients' needs by providing another layer of data and analytics to provide deeper intelligence, comparisons and benchmarking across investment lineups."  

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