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RepRisk: Best ESG data provider

RepRisk’s analysis of ESG risks has a clear goal: to identify and assess issues that have financial, compliance, and reputational implications, so that financial institutions have the actionable intelligence they need to make the best financing, investment, and overall business decisions. “We use a unique outside-in approach to look at what the world is saying about a company, instead of what a company says about itself,” says Alexandra Mihailescu Cichon, RepRisk’s Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing. 

RepRisk’s analysis of ESG risks has a clear goal: to identify and assess issues that have financial, compliance, and reputational implications, so that financial institutions have the actionable intelligence they need to make the best financing, investment, and overall business decisions. “We use a unique outside-in approach to look at what the world is saying about a company, instead of what a company says about itself,” says Alexandra Mihailescu Cichon, RepRisk’s Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing. 

Social issues to the fore

The challenges of the last 18 months have had a unique impact on RepRisk’s work. “While many thought Covid-19 would slow down the focus on ESG, it had the opposite effect,” she says. “Covid-19 helped to elevate the “S” in ESG, bringing to the fore issues like health and safety, employment conditions, and the topic of discrimination generally and of racism and racial inequality specifically.” 

RepRisk has therefore added new ESG Topic Tags to its research scope – pandemics/epidemics and racism/racial inequality – to enable its clients to do more granular research and assess ESG risks in line with the latest developments. 

Despite the astronomical growth of private equity over the past 10 years, while private markets are uniquely poised to further the work of sustainable investments through ESG implementation, they have been slower to integrate ESG compared to public markets. 

“Private equity and private debt investors who have discovered the value of ESG integration and employ granular, timely, and multi-dimensional data have seen improvements in due diligence; post-investment risk monitoring; and engagement/value creation,” Cichon says.

There are a variety of new datasets available that can be used for ESG risk management. RepRisk has worked on developing its first Spatial Analytics offering, which focuses on geospatial ESG risk data in the mining and oil and gas sectors. 

“We overlay geospatial data on environmentally sensitive or high-biodiversity risk areas – and for example, to see if a mine is located on or near a designated protected area or a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Because RepRisk has data on both projects and companies, we can link back that mine to the companies that own or operate it,” Cichon says.

Additionally, RepRisk added new languages to its research scope, mapped its data to the SASB and UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) framework, and made its ESG methodology and metrics transparently available on their website via the Jupyter Notebook. 

Pressure from LPs 

Encouragingly, a big mindset shift has occurred at the management level in private equity. Increasingly, LPs are asking GPs to demonstrate they have a structured approach to managing ESG risks and opportunities. 

“The risk to reputational damage and the potential for financial damage through a high-profile ESG-related incident is also a driver for LPs to expect their GPs to effectively manage ESG risks – and for GPs to manage their ESG risks – thereby preventing such outcomes,” Cichon concludes. 


Alexandra Mihailescu Cichon, Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing 
Alexandra Mihailescu Cichon joined RepRisk in 2013 and is the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Over her tenure, she has established and led RepRisk’s globally distributed Sales, Partnerships, Client Relationship Management, Sales Operations and Marketing & Communications teams. Before joining RepRisk, Mihailescu Cichon worked on the Global Sustainability Affairs team at Credit Suisse, focusing on environmental and social risk management, green business opportunities, corporate responsibility reporting, and employee engagement. 

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