MSCI ESG Research services

The world is changing. With it, the world of investing is changing. MSCI ESG Research provides in-depth research, ratings and analysis of the environmental, social and governance-related business practices of thousands of companies worldwide. Through early warnings and timely updates, our critical insights can help investors uncover risks and opportunities that traditional investment research may not detect. With the help of our dedicated global team of consultants, our institutional investor clients use our research to implement their responsible investment objectives.

Equity factor investing was pioneered in the 1970s based on the research, data and analytics created by Barra – today part of MSCI.  In recent years, MSCI has developed a broad range of indexes and analytical models that provide institutional investors with tools for evaluating factors and incorporating factor strategies into their portfolios. We are continuing to break new ground in factor research.  A study we conducted for Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund – the largest pension fund in the world – explored ways to use factor strategies alongside traditional active and passive allocations.  We recently introduced a new series of indexes, MSCI Diversified Multi-Factor Indexes, which use Barra risk tools to maintain optimal exposure to a diversified set of factors while keeping risk at the level of an underlying parent index.

In an April 2014 report titled Global Flows in a Digital Age, McKinsey researchers said “the movement of goods, services, finance and people has reached previously unimagined levels.” Increasing globalization has affected the way investors look at their portfolios as well. A number of prominent pension plans, for example, now consider “global equity” to be a single strategic asset class. Consultants, too, are more frequently recommending a global equity policy benchmark as the starting point for asset allocation. MSCI has provided insights and tools for global investing since the 1960s, when our developed market indexes gave investors the first efficient way to understand and pursue opportunity sets outside their home markets. Over the years, MSCI has continued to provide our clients with ongoing insights and tools for expanding their portfolios into new asset classes and geographies in developed, emerging and frontier markets.

We have been at the forefront of index construction and maintenance for more than 40 years, launching our first global equity indexes in 1969. Globalization and the rapid integration of markets have led us to explore alternative approaches to categorizing the global equity universe and product development. We have remained a market leader by expanding and enhancing our index offering to reflect the evolving and complex needs of the institutional investment community with groundbreaking new products, innovative research, high quality data and dedicated client support.
 

MSCI is the leading provider of tools for understanding the drivers of performance and risk in investment portfolios.  We have a practitioner’s perspective that comes not only from our experience as former investors but also from what we learn in the hundreds of meetings we have with asset managers and asset owners every week.  Our long-standing relationships with our clients are collaborations in which we explore and test new ideas together.