Just a few days after Morningstar announced a sustainable investing education initiative with the Money Management Institute, it announced the acquisition of a 40% ownership stake in Sustainalytics, one of the leading providers of ESG ratings and analyses.
Sustainalytics has been a partner with Morningstar since August 2015 and its environmental, social and governance ratings are the basis for Morningstar's Sustainability Rating for more than 35,000 mutual funds and ETFs and for Morningstar's Global Sustainability Index Family, a series of 27 global equity indexes comprising companies with high sustainability ratings and a risk-return profile similar to the overall market.
"Enhancing this relationship enables us to leverage the expertise Sustainalytics has built over the last 25 years, and build on the momentum we started with the launch of the Sustainability Rating," said Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor in a statement.
Michael Jantzi, CEO of Sustainalytics, in that same statement said his firm's "close collaboration with Morningstar over the last two years has helped to broaden distribution" of its ESG research, "allowing Sustainalytics to work with more asset managers and owners to integrate ESG into their investment processes."
