Manulife Investment Management (IM) has announced a pilot with Singapore-headquartered fintech Hashstacs (STACS) to review its sustainability-labelled bonds.
In a Nov 3 press release, the global wealth and asset management segment of Manulife Financial Corporation says STACS’s ESGpedia platform will help monitor the underlying quality of its sustainable investments.
ESGpedia powers the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Greenprint ESG Registry, and is intended to provide holistic environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data across multiple sectors and digital tools to enable ongoing monitoring and visibility of sustainability claims.
The asset management industry faces challenges around ESG data, says Manulife IM, with a lack of forward-looking disclosure, real-time data and common taxonomy. “Data is fragmented and being presented in either narrative or unstructured form, with no ‘golden’ copy data architecture of investible instruments, hindering effective sustainable investment decisions.”
Manulife IM adds that current methods of assessing sustainability claims are highly manual and labour-intensive.
ESGpedia serves as a central ESG registry for the specific financial dataset, aggregating ESG data and certifications across multiple industry data sources.
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In addition to allowing customers to access ongoing data from authorised counterparties, the portfolio monitoring tool on ESGpedia aims to streamline the monitoring of sustainability labelled bonds by highlighting third party sustainability-related certifications of underlying assets.
Eric Nietsch, head of sustainable investing, Asia at Manulife Investment Management, says: “STACS ESGpedia portfolio monitoring tool is intended to allow us to see greater asset level details, such as the green certifications of the buildings financed by green bonds. This would support our ongoing due diligence and monitoring of investee companies.”
Benjamin Soh, co-founder and managing director at STACS, says: “At STACS, we aim to bring forward the future of ESG finance via holistic data and digital tools on ESGpedia. We are excited to be working with Manulife Investment Management to enhance effective investment monitoring of its sustainability-labelled bonds and streamline the existing process digitally.”
