ACA Group Announces Acquisition of Data Specialist Ethos ESG to Offer First Data Analytics Product
ACA Group (ACA), the leading financial services governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) advisor, announced the acquisition of Ethos ESG (Ethos), a provider of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings data and software for financial advisors, asset managers, institutions, and investors.
This is ACA's first analytics service, which will be combined with ESG experts from ACA to build an integrated tech and advice product under the ESG Advisory practice. ACA's existing ESG Advisory practice assists firms that incorporate ESG into their business or investing activities with a variety of programmatic needs.
This currently includes advice and implementation support around strategy, policies/procedures, regulations and frameworks, training, and external reporting, among other areas. With Ethos, ACA’s clients will now also be able to easily analyse investments and automate several elements of ESG reporting.
Ethos was founded in 2019 and provides an interactive platform for evaluating over 350,000 impact ratings, including companies, stocks, and funds, through the lens of 45 ESG causes such as climate change, racial justice, mental health, and more.
Ethos enables GRC professionals to understand the ESG characteristics of their investments and make responsible decisions that align with their firm's values and ESG commitments by providing transparency into how each impact score is calculated as well as the ability to upload portfolios and create models.
Ethos generates its ratings using a proprietary set of around 100 underlying databases. These databases provide a one-of-a-kind impact view of ratings, as well as insight into crucial indicators where available. Clients can identify which underlying database source is used for each data point because the databases are completely transparent.
Ethos has also built mechanisms to swiftly scrape the public domain for publicly available information to include in the ratings. With these cutting-edge capabilities, Ethos can quickly add company coverage to assist customers in achieving comprehensive coverage of their investment portfolio.
Ethos has made an investment in innovation with the recent release of its Impact Calculator, an embeddable widget that takes a dollar amount and immediately calculates the real-world equivalent impact of investing that amount in a specific fund or other product compared to a benchmark.
Ethos has just launched its Carbon Neutral Certification programme for mutual funds and ETFs, which was developed in collaboration with Change Finance. Ethos offers an independent study of a fund's carbon footprint (including Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions) and carbon credits (offsets) through the certification to certify whether the fund is carbon neutral within a specific term.
Shvetank Shah, CEO of ACA Group, said:
"This is an exciting step in helping to grow our presence in the ESG space and is ACA Group’s first foray into analytics as a service. We are invigorated to be building out and launching our data capabilities, starting with Ethos ESG. Combining data with our scalable solutions will continue to empower our clients to reimagine GRC and protect and grow their business.”
Luke Wilcox, Founder and CEO of Ethos ESG, said:
"We are thrilled to partner with ACA Group, as their brand and reach in the GRC space is well-known. Not only is taking into consideration the ESG impact of your decisions right on its merits but greater transparency into ESG issues helps firms mitigate risk and make informed choices while growing sustainably.”
Dan Mistler, Head of ESG Advisory at ACA Group, said:
"This pairing will help us to leverage data in a new way to help firms of all sizes develop and monitor their ESG programs to mitigate risk, make informed choices, combat greenwashing, and grow profitably and sustainably in the process. Access to high-quality, transparent ESG data is an essential part of any ESG endeavour, and our partnership with Ethos will allow us to build and protect our clients’ ESG strategies in ways few others can."
Source: ACA Group
