Responsible investors need decision-useful data to inform their investment process and reporting. Recent developments in standards, rules and laws regarding corporate sustainability disclosure aim to address these data needs.
However, standard setters and regulators often consider responsible investors as a single, homogenous group of financial market participants with common data needs. In practice, responsible investors differ significantly in their needs for data, due to differing objectives, strategies, jurisdictions, etc.
The PRI’s work on Investor Data Needs is to ensure that these disclosure standards, rules and laws provide decision-useful information to all responsible investors.
Under the PRI’s work on investor data needs, we are working with signatories to develop a more evidence-based understanding of responsible investors’ data needs. So far this research includes:
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The development of the Investor Data Needs Framework, with support from Chronos Sustainability. The Framework sets out a high-level, issue-agnostic structure to identify decision-useful corporate sustainability data. Elements of this research were also discussed in the webinar on ‘Untangling data needs for responsible investors’.
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A consultation on the Investor Data Needs Framework, which gathered feedback from 39 PRI signatories, a corporate standard setter and corporate industry body on the Framework to inform next steps on the research.
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Research on ‘What data do investors need to manage human rights risks?’, with support from Shift. This research was to understand the qualitative and quantitative data needs and challenges associated with institutional investors’ responsibility to respect human rights and integration into investment processes and stewardship activities. This research ran in parallel with the development of the Investor Data Needs Framework.
The PRI is now in the process of refining the current iteration of the Investor Data Needs Framework and exploring the application of the framework to build more granular positions on issues – particularly human rights and nature related data needs – as well as scoping out work to apply the framework to understand private markets data needs.
For any queries about our work on the data needs framework and planned next steps, please contact Adams Koshy: [email protected]
For more information on the human rights project, please contact Nikolaj Halkjaer Pedersen: [email protected]
NB: This page was originally published in June 2022 and updated in April 2024.
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