OUR Approach

Simple, Flexible and Transparent Sustainability Data

Connecting you to more data sources than ever before

No more black box methodologies

At Matter, we strive to provide a comprehensive, 360 degree view on sustainability performance by connecting the financial industry directly to insights from leading sustainability experts in the field.

By trusting those who are closest to a specific issue, we challenge the notion that an in-house analyst or algorithm knows more about a given company or state than a collective of industry or subject matter experts. Our job is to bring you closer to the actual insights - not lock you into a proprietary rating method. Let us help you open the black-box of sustainability data and go beyond the numbers.

Beyond ratings

Financial institutions often struggle to apply sustainability data. ESG ratings are easy to use, but hard to understand. So much is lost when the complexity of sustainability is reduced to a number.

We connect each individual security in your portfolio to insights from multiple sources, each of which represents the forefront of expertise in its respective field. Instead of serving you aggregated numbers for each security in your portfolio, we help you understand, for example, how your investments can have low emissions but poor management of biodiversity at the same time.  You see where the data is coming from, and understand the methods used to generate it. The depth of this information is critical to our clients, because nuance is important in all aspects of asset management.

Contextual insights

The foundation for any insight is the underlying data. This is why we connect our clients directly to insights from leading experts in their field.

As thought leaders and subject matter experts, they are closer to the context of the insights we bring you. This means, for example, that we trust their definition of whether or not palm oil is produced sustainably or medicine is priced fairly. As such, we do not want you to trust us with the evaluation of the sustainability performance of a company - you should trust in our ability to identify the most credible sources and data on all topics related to responsible and sustainable investing. We evaluate each of the sources we use based on the quality and transparency of their methodology, and only include renowned sources with a well-founded and transparent methodology.

Complex, but not complicated

Our intuitive reporting tool retains the complexity of sustainability insights, without making the analyses more complicated.

The insights from our sources are maintained and translated directly to you in our analyses. Matter clients access these insights as flags that are aggregated for portfolio level analyses, which can be expanded when diving deeper into information on a singly security level. In a few seconds, you can identify all the securities in a portfolio that are flagged by our experts, isolate a single security or its issuer , and assess who flagged it, for what, when, and based on which methodology. We empower our clients to navigate the complexity of sustainability analyses, find the answers they need, and make better decisions.

Built to be understood outside the ESG department

Contrary to classic sustainability ratings, we have not only designed our methodology to make sense for your ESG team, but also to your customers, clients or LP's.

There are more than one hundred competing ESG ratings out there, and with a correlation of about 0.3 between them, it can be difficult for a non-expert to know what you mean, when you communicate your efforts on sustainability through ratings. Our intuitive approach to defining and measuring sustainability translates better into external communication and customer promises, and can be aggregated into simple one-page overviews, or even integrated directly onto your client-facing platform.

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