EU ESG Leadership is Big

In September of this year the President and CEO of State Street Global Advisors, Cyrus Taraporevala, stood up at an FT Forum on the Future of Asset Management and ticked off his list of ten changes he believes will define the practice of asset management in the next ten years.

It should have been no surprise to anyone that Taraporevala’s list contained environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment. By 2029, Taraporevala said, the asset-management industry will no longer be talking about ESG in terms of standalone investment strategies, but quite the contrary. The quality and consistency of ESG data and analytics across all asset classes are advancing to the point that they will be fully incorporated by portfolio managers into all investment processes. Before much longer, Taraporevala predicted, “a company’s ESG rating will be as important as their credit rating.”