Asset Servicing at Northern Trust

Our asset servicing business is committed to supporting the efforts of our institutional clients to meet sustainable investment goals by giving them access to ESG insights, comprehensive reporting tools and risk exposure analytics capabilities such as carbon footprint analysis. With the knowledge gained through these tools, our clients can engage with asset managers and stakeholders around the evolving environmental impacts of their investment portfolios, manage potential stakeholder concerns and gain greater awareness of financial and reputational risks.

We also encourage our clients to achieve greater transparency and satisfy ever-increasing regulatory requirements by integrating the resulting analytics into their disclosures and other publications.

To support our clients’ growing ESG oversight and governance programs, we offer a suite of solutions.

ESG Insights

Launched in 2020, this service offers a quantitative approach to measuring ESG factors. It provides clients a summary ESG profile of their investments with more detailed reporting that includes carbon footprint analysis.

Post-Trade Compliance Monitoring

Through this service, clients can track the compliance of individual investment managers or programs to their ESG-focused mandates. The service identifies breaches to a client’s mandated instructions by flagging investments in companies that derive revenue from restricted areas. We recently enhanced this service to provide greater flexibility for clients with more detailed monitoring requirements, such as custom revenue thresholds.

Performance Measurement

This service enables clients to evaluate the relative performance impact of ESG factors on their portfolios, programs and policy statements. It supports a broad range of ESG-focused benchmarks that allow for relative comparisons of securities down to the most granular level. Throughout 2021, we expect to continue to focus on expanding our portfolio measurement and monitoring capabilities in relation to climate risk. We are further integrating ESG data into our analytics and reporting platforms to help clients gauge the impact of their ESG strategies on overall investment performance and effectively monitor enhanced investment restrictions. We are also developing additional support to address a growing range of regulatory and industry reporting frameworks that are impacting clients around the world.

Read the full report here.