Benchmarking Overview
- 02:39
The key steps used in building benchmarking analysis.
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Benchmarking ESG SustainabilityTranscript
Benchmarking overview. Let's take a look at the steps that we'll follow when we're conducting benchmarking analysis. Now, the first step is to identify the risk or issue that we want to benchmark. For example, greenhouse gas emissions, employee health and safety, or business ethics. Clearly, we are only going to be focusing on issues which are material to that company, as if an issue is not material then it's not gonna have any impact on our investment decisions, and we don't need to bother benchmarking it. It's also important to note that just because a company discloses data on an issue that doesn't mean it's material and vice versa. Often, we would look to the SASB Materiality Map to help guide us on this. Once we've done this, we need to identify the relevant metrics for our benchmarking analysis, and often we would look for at least two or three metrics for each issue. However, this is one of the most challenging steps in benchmarking as we're often limited by what the company has disclosed. And even where we have data, it does need to be comparable to what peer companies have disclosed for us to be able to benchmark. So often a bit of pragmatism is required in relying on metrics which are maybe not the best metrics for measuring the risk, but there are at least metrics where we have good data. Also, to prevent the benchmarking being too backward looking. It can be helpful to look at strategic information provided by the company or to look at investments that the company has made to help guide us on how the risk is being managed, and then incorporate this into our benchmarking. The next step is to collect the data, and typically this will start with the company disclosures, either from their sustainability reports, or if they've presented an annual report that integrates financial and sustainability reporting, we can use the integrated report. Data from data providers is also widely used. For example, on litigation matters and controversies. Once the data is collected, we can compare the company to its peers on our selected benchmarks. However, even then, we may face issues. For example, if a company hasn't disclosed any data on an issue, how should we deal with this? Are there any alternative data sources or metrics? Should the company be penalized for non-disclosure? Also, if we have two or three metrics to compare, how do we prioritize or weight these metrics in our analysis? Particularly if a company outperforms peers on one metric, but underperforms on another, we might need to think about if one metric is more important than the others. Finally, we then think about how the output of the benchmarking affects our investment decisions. Should we increase or decrease our forecasts as a result of this benchmarking, or should we start to adjust our cost of capital? This will vary depending on the approach used by the investor.