Research shows that asset managers are increasingly using third-party analytical tools and dashboards to uncover alternative ESG data from social media sentiment to engagement with universities.

As an industry agnostic, Rebecca Healey, who co-chairs the EMEA regional committee and regulatory subcommittee at the . "ESG is just a risk assessment. It does not take into account the product, the service, the solution, and the negative externalities."

Public equities, a particular concern
Barone Soares said that it took her firm a full year to review equities' providers to see which ones "were really serious" about going beyond ESG and pushing companies to go further. "It is hard because even when fund managers have created the culture, and some are serious and really good about it, they often have little leverage because they are not big enough and don’t own enough of a company to say, 'Hey look, this is how I am going to vote.'"

My concern is that the movement to ESG makes people feel good about themselves and a way to ratify the status quo a little better. But that is not enough for what we need to do by 2030," she said.

Healey at FIX says the industry and regulators obtaining accurate data and applying it under global standards will determine ESG’s success.

The non-profit work with stakeholders on regulatory and other issues affecting multi-asset global markets, focused on standardising disclosure reporting, increasing transparency, and reducing risks and costs for market participants.

Coalescing on standards
Last weekend's G7 summit of finance ministers saw some progress on this front, with the group agreeing to make climate disclosure mandatory. By whose standards and by when remains unclear. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is one of the main independent bodies developing new standards relevant to climate change disclosures and other ESG priorities to automate sustainability-related processes. The Financial Stability Board's Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) is widely used by fund managers to report climate-related financial information.

The European Commission is working on the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) to give firms a more even reporting system.

CSRD “aims to create a set of rules that will – over time – bring sustainability reporting on a par with financial reporting.” Its new mechanism, in the simplest terms, will require companies to digitally tag sustainability information, making it machine readable and comparable, whereby data can be passed seamlessly across the investment lifecycle.

The promise is more meaningful, comparable information for investors and other stakeholders, giving currency to the saying that you can’t manage what you can't measure.