S&P Global Ratings Launches Sustainable Finance Group To Expand ESG Analytics And Research Focus

As part of its commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) analytics and research along with innovation, S&P Global Ratings has established a Sustainable Finance Team within its Global Corporate and Infrastructure Ratings Practice.

This team brings together and expands upon S&P Global Ratings’ ten-year track record of strong research in environmental and climate finance (Green Finance) as well as ESG analytics.

The Sustainable Finance Team will be led by Mike Wilkins, Managing Director, Corporate and Infrastructure Ratings. The team will be part of the Innovation Group within the Global Corporate and Infrastructure Ratings Practice, which focuses on the analytical development of offerings in emerging areas of significant investor interest. The group is led by Hans Wright, Head of Innovation at S&P Global Ratings, and reports to Susan Gray, Global Head of Corporate and Infrastructure Ratings.

The Sustainable Finance Team will build upon S&P Global’s commitment to delivering analytics and research that provides essential insights into ESG factors as they relate to the capital markets. This includes continued enhancement of the company’s analytical approach to its Green Evaluations, of which more than 25 have been issued since launching in April 2017, representing a total of $32 billion of evaluated debt in all major asset classes and geographies.

Given the importance of ESG in credit assessment, a key focus for the Sustainable Finance Team will be enhancing transparency, training, and communication around the incorporation of ESG in credit ratings. This will help ensure that S&P Global Ratings continues to demonstrate robustness and consistency in our approach to integrating ESG factors ?into our ratings. The Sustainable Finance Team includes dedicated analysts with a background in sustainable finance, environmental research, and/or credit analytics.

The Sustainable Finance team aims to collaborate with other divisions of S&P Global, which seeks to help capital markets create a common approach in incorporating ESG factors into fundamental risk analyses. Through offerings such as sustainability benchmarks from S&P Dow Jones Indices, ESG and Green Evaluations from S&P Global Ratings, and sustainability data and analytics from S&P Global Market Intelligence, S&P Global aims to provide relative measures of environmental and social impacts, climate resilience, and corporate governance that investors can incorporate into their own assessments of an asset’s long-term value and financial performance in line with their sustainability goals.