The private-equity business model puts general partners in a good position to help portfolio companies improve their ESG integration and reporting practices in a number of ways. These include identifying relevant issues and best practices for dealing with them, providing measurement and reporting tools, benchmarking against other portfolio companies, offering access to internal and external experts, and monitoring regulatory developments.
Some GPs have developed methodologies for assessing the degree of ESG sophistication in potential portfolio companies and helping them improve practice.
Firms can adopt a mechanism for simplifying and harmonizing ESG data reported by their portfolio companies to GPs and by GPs to LPs. Every general partner where we interviewed had a bespoke set of KPIs and a methodology for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data, and all agreed that some degree of standardization would be useful. Portfolio companies with multiple GPs face multiple data requests. Similarly, GPs receive wide-ranging and differing data requests from their LPs. Make net-zero commitments.
Given the size of this asset class, the PE industry needs to make the kind of commitment to “net zero by 2050” that all financial institutions under the umbrella of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero are making. The industry also needs to improve its track record with DEI. Today private equity is still predominantly white and male, particularly on deal teams. Evidence continues to mount that a more-diverse workforce leads to better performance. Lastly, the authors write how the PE industry needs to directly confront the fact that the tremendous wealth it has created has been unevenly distributed. LPs, GPs, and the top executives of portfolio companies have benefited to a much greater degree than other employees of those companies.
Read the full article at: www.top1000funds.com
About the Author
Follow on Twitter Follow on Linkedin Visit Website More Content by EcoVadis EN
