Building Centralized ESG Data Governance

The Head of ESG Solutions at a Swiss asset manager with €60 billion under management explains how they built a unified ESG data management platform with StarQube.

When you’re managing ESG data for 16,000 companies across multiple global offices, data governance isn’t just a technical challenge—it’s a strategic imperative. Over 14 years, this Swiss asset manager built a 20-person ESG division that now processes 500+ sustainability indicators weekly, creating proprietary ESG ratings that inform investment decisions across all subsidiaries. The key to making this work? A centralized ESG data management platform that ensures every team, everywhere, works from the same source of truth.

Building an ESG Data Management Infrastructure

Q: Can you explain your responsibilities and how you’ve developed ESG capabilities within your organization?

I joined the company in 2007 and have spent the last 14 years building our ESG division. The process evolved in stages. First, we developed a proprietary methodology for rating companies on environmental, social, and governance axes. Then we partnered with external ESG data providers to collect the raw material necessary to build our scores. Finally, we developed the tools to distribute these ratings internally to our portfolio management teams and externally through client reporting.

Today, we receive several hundred indicators on a weekly basis across a scope of 16,000 companies. These indicators are precise qualitative or quantitative answers to non-financial questions—everything from carbon emissions in scope 1, 2, and 3, to whether companies have collective bargaining agreements or policies promoting women. Each of these indicators is dated, as are the ratings we calculate from them. This forms the raw material for our proprietary ESG scoring methodology.

The ESG division also has a dedicated team that advises portfolio managers on how to use these ESG scores to optimize their use in the investment process without compromising portfolio performance.

Implementing a Centralized ESG Data Platform

Q: How do you use the StarQube’s platform ESG data management?

StarQube sits at the heart of our ESG data governance. The foundation consists of a database and Financial Query Language (FQL) that allows us to manipulate data efficiently. All the data sources we use feed into the StarQube database, and we use the platform as an engine to calculate ESG scores according to our proprietary methodology.

At the same time, StarQube retrieves our portfolio positions, so managers can view the ESG scores of each holding as well as the composite ESG score of their portfolios. We’ve built a web-based interface that our teams use for day-to-day work, but StarQube is the engine behind it—the calculation motor that makes everything possible.

This architecture allows us to keep the agility we need. Our teams no longer need to mobilize the IT department for each project, yet we have the computing power that individual Excel files could never provide.

Why StarQube for ESG Data Governance?

Q: What were the key factors in choosing StarQube to implement your ESG data governance?

I can point to four main characteristics:

1. Computing power and flexibility: StarQube provides extraordinary computing power and flexibility. Over my 34 years in asset management, I’ve seen teams everywhere struggle with Excel files—50-megabyte spreadsheets that take 15 minutes to open and break with every Windows update. StarQube gives you the computing power of a production IT service with flexibility that rivals Excel. You’re no longer prisoner to spreadsheets, but you don’t need to wait six months for IT to deliver a solution either. The proximity with StarQube’s team also facilitates rapid development of new functionalities when necessary.
2. Ease of data manipulation: The unique database repository coupled with its simplified financial language allows us to process huge volumes of data, normalize it, and make it accessible to everyone in a centralized location. It’s very easy to integrate new data, regardless of format—structured or unstructured. When you’re dealing with 500+ indicators across 16,000 companies, this capability is essential.
3. Point-in-time database for rigorous research: The portfolio management modules are very effective for testing hypotheses or strategies. Are the scores we’ve built consistent? Have companies with the best scores performed best in recent years? These tests can be conducted accurately because the database is point-in-time—data is time-stamped at receipt and stored as we receive it on a specific date. This means we can test strategies using exactly the information that would have been available at any point in the past, avoiding look-ahead bias.
4. Speed: The core calculation engine is very powerful, which allows us to perform calculations on large datasets and universes of securities quickly. This speed is crucial when you’re running complex ESG calculations across thousands of companies.

Creating Competitive Advantage Through ESG Data Centralization

Q: How does StarQube’s platform give you a competitive advantage?

The ESG data governance we’ve put in place is a real advantage for our entire organization. Without a doubt, the major benefit today is that all our extra-financial data is centralized on the same platform and made available to all teams in real time. The ESG vision of our investment universe is unique and shared by everyone.

In an organization like ours, this is very important because all our subsidiaries and teams around the world consume the same ESG data, the same scores—unlike other organizations that have compartmentalized databases. We have teams in London, the United States, Paris, Geneva, Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and all of them use the same data source.

If you question large asset management groups today about their position on ESG, you’ll get different answers depending on who you ask, because they’re not looking at the same sources or the same indicators: it’s not at all evident that someone in Hong Kong has access to the same information as someone in Paris, because systems are very siloed.

We’ve overcome this by building our entire methodology on StarQube and distributing the information to all downstream teams. This is a significant advantage. When we develop something new—a new ESG score, for example—we can deploy it extremely quickly, and we don’t have consistency issues because everyone uses the same data.

Real-World Impact of Unified ESG Data Management

Q: How does this centralized approach benefit your investment teams?

Our investment teams access ESG information through the web-based interface we’ve built, which is powered by StarQube. Portfolio managers can see ESG scores for individual holdings and composite scores for their entire portfolios in real time. They don’t need to call the ESG team to ask our opinion on a particular company—the information is immediately available.

We have a dedicated team that works closely with portfolio managers to advise them on how to integrate these ESG metrics into their investment process. The goal is to optimize the use of extra-financial ratings without compromising portfolio performance. Because all teams rely on the same centralized data, we maintain consistency whether managers are running systematic quantitative strategies or conviction-based approaches.

For our systematic portfolio managers who need more granular access, StarQube also provides the capabilities to backtest strategies, configure risk models, and optimize portfolios with ESG constraints—all using the same unified ESG database.

Looking Forward

Building centralized ESG data governance isn’t just about technology—it’s about creating organizational alignment around sustainability. By establishing StarQube as the single source of truth for ESG data, we’ve ensured that our proprietary methodology, refined over 14 years, is applied consistently across every investment decision, in every office, for every client.

The result is not just operational efficiency, but a genuine competitive advantage: the ability to innovate rapidly on ESG scoring, deploy changes globally in days rather than months, and provide clients with consistent, rigorous ESG analysis backed by a robust data governance framework.

Ready to build scalable ESG data governance for your organization? Contact StarQube to learn how our ESG data management platform can centralize your sustainability data and create competitive advantage.