FAQs
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What does Util do?
Util is the only impact data provider that uses AI across peer-reviewed journals to objectively quantify a company’s impact, giving investors the evidence they need to deliver on their sustainable investing goals. Our data helps investors capture hidden alpha with custom portfolios, capitalise on a company’s potential future value, and better understand its risk profile. Util has shaken the sustainable data market by reimagining how it could be done.
Our approach resonates with a growing roster of clients, including Pictet, PGIM Quantitative Solutions, DanskeBank, Degroof Petercam Asset Management, Luxembourg Stock Exchange, CBOE and more, and has gained traction across media outlets including Investment Week, Forbes, the FT, Bloomberg, and Responsible Investor.
Util has participated in a suite of world-leading accelerators, including the NY FinTech Innovation Lab, the London Mayor's International Business Programme, and the Mass Challenge FinTech program. In 2022, Util won Environmental Finance’s ESG Research of the Year, North America and Investment Week’s Best Sustainable Investment Research and Ratings Provider. Most recently, Util was listed among the AIFinTech100 companies of 2023.
What problem are you trying to solve?
There are numerous ways that clients gather and parse sustainability and impact data, but few of them are comprehensive enough to deliver true value due to their limited scale and scope, and self-reported data. Many traditional ESG data providers rely on subjective company disclosures and analyst opinions to package a company’s performance against several metrics into one score.
We don’t limit our analysis to large-cap companies or developed markets. We cover every company uniformly, across size, sector and geography, and against thousands of sustainability concepts and frameworks.
How does it actually work?
Our data is powered by a proprietary AI-Driven Evidence Engine™ that maps a company’s products to over 2,000 sustainability concepts and frameworks using peer-reviewed academic research as evidence. The result is an objective data set that shows, with evidence, a company's positive and negative impact on the world.
How is it different from ESG?
ESG data includes everything that goes into creating a product, be it company operations, policies or governance. Util data encompasses information about how the product affects the world around it.
Both are important parts of the sustainable investing puzzle. However, ESG does have two blind spots. First, assessments are highly subjective, with scores varying considerably among providers. Second, they often hinge on disclosures, meaning fossil fuel or tobacco companies can score highly on the basis of their transparency.
The 2020 Boohoo scandal is a good example of the pitfalls of ESG. The question should never have been "Does Boohoo report positively on supply-chain management?" but instead, "Is a company that sells £5 dresses likely to have a positive social and environmental impact?"
Who is Util's data for?
For Financial Services
Meet client and regulatory demand for sustainable investing with evidence-based impact data for public companies or Fixed Income across the 17 UN SDGs that can be used in client and regulatory reporting and portfolio construction.
For Supply Chain and Procurement
Assess and compare companies across your supply chain by exploring the impacts of their products and services relative to the UN SDGs so that you can report on, evaluate and find alternative suppliers to meet your sustainability goals.
For Reputation Management
Increase your reputation and strengthen credibility among employees, investors and stakeholders by evaluating and comparing your company’s impact relative to any sustainability framework.
What are the benefits of Util's data?
Avoid Unseen Risk
Util’s impact data helps you identify and assess unseen impact risks, such as climate change, resource scarcity, regulatory changes, and reputational risks that may not appear in company disclosures or subjective reports.
Make informed investment decisions
Get evidence-based insights into a company's performance across known sustainability frameworks to understand long-term value, risks, and competitive position so you can make better-informed investment decisions.
Meet client demand, without sacrificing performance
Provide clients with a clear sustainable investing strategy, backed by robust reporting and evidence to meet their investing goals. Plus, discover hidden alpha by seeing how a company’s revenue maps to its stakeholder impact and long-term value.
What makes Util different?
Traceable
Company impact scores are built from peer-reviewed academic research and can be traced back to the research article.
Objective
Based on rigorously reviewed scientific evidence, you can trust that your impact data is free of self-reporting, opinion, + greenwashing claims.
Up-to-Date
As new information and academic research come out, our AI-driven Evidence Engine gets smarter, ensuring you have the most up-to-date data on a company’s impact.
What if a company has positive and negative scores at the same time?
No company, product, or service is unilaterally 'good' or 'bad'.
The world is a complicated place. Electric cars are less polluting than traditional vehicles, so they make the world cleaner. But they’re still cars, which means the rate of accidents, injuries, and deaths doesn't change. So they're not making the world safer.
Companies produce many products and services, each of which can have multiple effects on the world. It gets complex, fast. Our data reveals whether a company’s products are making the world better, or worse, or both — and by how much.
What’s an example of your analytics in action?
Let’s say you’re trying to understand Meta's impact on mental health.
Social media happens to be Meta's only revenue-generating product. Our technology will identify every instance in which a peer-reviewed publication references social media in relation to mental health. Because we access such a significant volume of academic sources, we can automatically establish consensus on the relationship between the product and sustainability concept.
Of course, it’s more nuanced than “Company X is bad for Sustainability Concept Y.” Many companies have more than one product, and each product is going to have myriad positive and negative impacts on myriad sustainability concepts. We capture all of them to holistically show a company's impact.
Why peer-reviewed academic evidence?
We believe the peer-reviewed framework is the most reliable authority on veracity when analysing data at scale as peer-reviewed academic literature is a vast, credible and regularly updated dataset.
We have access to over 120 million academic articles, representing conclusions that are subjected to thorough expert review and reflect the latest scientific findings. This source base allows us to quantify the impact of thousands of companies without relying on biased and variable sources, such as company disclosures, or noisy and sentiment-driven datasets, such as social media.
Why the SDGs?
Our SDG Impact products for Public Companies and Fixed income leverage the UN SDG framework as the 17 goals and 169 sub targets have become a common way to measure impact. The SDGs work as a lens for any market, asset class and geography and can be set as a benchmark for any company thanks to the universality of their underlying principles. They’re a good guide for evaluating not just a company’s risk and reward profile, but also its third dimension: real-world impact.
Achieving the SDGs by 2030 requires an estimated $5-7 trillion per year. Not only do investors have the unique opportunity to bridge that gap, but the outcome will likely support long-term financial returns.
While we use the SDGs as a primary framework, we also have access to thousands of other sustainability concepts.
What sustainability frameworks can Util's data map to?
With Universal Impact, we can map to most known sustainability and impact frameworks, including the UN-SDG, SFDR/ EU Taxonomy, GRI and TNFD, as well as custom, client-defined frameworks.
What is Universal Impact?
Powered by Util’s proprietary Evidence Engine, Universal Impact expands Util’s evidence-driven insights to cover more asset classes and sustainability frameworks, allowing for deeper and more customized analysis that can be used by a broader audience to support more sophisticated analysis.
Universal Impact enables investors to discover and quantify hidden impact risk and unseen value with customized, evidence-based impact data that enables analysis across a broad range of asset classes and sustainability frameworks.
Key Differentiators:
- Exclusive Fixed Income coverage through our partnership with ICE
- Leverages Util’s Proprietary Evidence Engine™ to surface transparent, objective and evidence-based impact data derived from academic research.
- Expanded coverage across Funds, Indexes, Public Companies and Private Companies.
- More data per company than any other SDG offering.
- The ability to map to many impact frameworks, including those that are client-defined.
- Granular data feed down to the sustainability target level, to support deeper, more sophisticated analysis.
Universal Impact’s broad asset coverage includes 50,000 Public Companies (with equity coverage across all major indices and exchanges), Fixed Income (through ICE Sustainable Finance partnership) and 6,000 Funds.
What is SDG Impact for Public Companies?
Powered by Util’s proprietary Evidence Engine, SDG Impact for Public Companies provides detailed, evidence-based impact metrics for 50,000 public companies across the 17 UN SDGs that can be accessed through an intuitive Client Portal and/or popular data marketplaces.
SDG Impact for Public Companies enables investors to access Util’s evidence-driven impact data for over 50,000 Public companies through the lens of the UN-SDGs so that you can grow and retain clients by incorporating sustainability data into their portfolios. This successful first offering from Util has drawn interest from PGIM, Danske Bank, and Degroof Petercam, among others.
Key Differentiators:
- Objective, evidence-based impact data powered by Util’s AI-Driven Evidence Engine
- Can be easily procured through popular data aggregators and marketplaces or accessed through an intuitive portal
- More data per company than any other SDG offering.
What is SDG Impact for Fixed Income?
Through our exclusive partnership with ICE Sustainable Finance, Util's data is available for over 1.2 million fixed-income securities.
SDG Impact for Fixed Income expands Util's asset coverage, via our exclusive partnership with ICE Sustainable Finance, providing evidence-based impact metrics for Fixed Income for all listed companies (50k+) across the 17 UN SDGs.
Key Differentiators:
- Leverages ICE's extensive security-to-entity linkage capabilities to map Util's granular data covering 50,000 public companies to ICE's database of 1.2 million fixed-income securities
- Objective, evidence-based impact data powered by Util’s AI-Driven Evidence Engine
- Can be easily procured via ICE or Util
- More data per security than any other SDG offering
What does Util do?
Util is the only impact data provider that uses AI across peer-reviewed journals to objectively quantify a company’s impact, giving investors the evidence they need to deliver on their sustainable investing goals. Our data helps investors capture hidden alpha with custom portfolios, capitalise on a company’s potential future value, and better understand its risk profile. Util has shaken the sustainable data market by reimagining how it could be done.
Our approach resonates with a growing roster of clients, including Pictet, PGIM Quantitative Solutions, DanskeBank, Degroof Petercam Asset Management, Luxembourg Stock Exchange, CBOE and more, and has gained traction across media outlets including Investment Week, Forbes, the FT, Bloomberg, and Responsible Investor.
Util has participated in a suite of world-leading accelerators, including the NY FinTech Innovation Lab, the London Mayor's International Business Programme, and the Mass Challenge FinTech program. In 2022, Util won Environmental Finance’s ESG Research of the Year, North America and Investment Week’s Best Sustainable Investment Research and Ratings Provider. Most recently, Util was listed among the AIFinTech100 companies of 2023.
What problem are you trying to solve?
There are numerous ways that clients gather and parse sustainability and impact data, but few of them are comprehensive enough to deliver true value due to their limited scale and scope, and self-reported data. Many traditional ESG data providers rely on subjective company disclosures and analyst opinions to package a company’s performance against several metrics into one score.
We don’t limit our analysis to large-cap companies or developed markets. We cover every company uniformly, across size, sector and geography, and against thousands of sustainability concepts and frameworks.
How does it actually work?
Our data is powered by a proprietary AI-Driven Evidence Engine™ that maps a company’s products to over 2,000 sustainability concepts and frameworks using peer-reviewed academic research as evidence. The result is an objective data set that shows, with evidence, a company's positive and negative impact on the world.
How is it different from ESG?
ESG data includes everything that goes into creating a product, be it company operations, policies or governance. Util data encompasses information about how the product affects the world around it.
Both are important parts of the sustainable investing puzzle. However, ESG does have two blind spots. First, assessments are highly subjective, with scores varying considerably among providers. Second, they often hinge on disclosures, meaning fossil fuel or tobacco companies can score highly on the basis of their transparency.
The 2020 Boohoo scandal is a good example of the pitfalls of ESG. The question should never have been "Does Boohoo report positively on supply-chain management?" but instead, "Is a company that sells £5 dresses likely to have a positive social and environmental impact?"
Who is Util's data for?
For Financial Services
Meet client and regulatory demand for sustainable investing with evidence-based impact data for public companies or Fixed Income across the 17 UN SDGs that can be used in client and regulatory reporting and portfolio construction.
For Supply Chain and Procurement
Assess and compare companies across your supply chain by exploring the impacts of their products and services relative to the UN SDGs so that you can report on, evaluate and find alternative suppliers to meet your sustainability goals.
For Reputation Management
Increase your reputation and strengthen credibility among employees, investors and stakeholders by evaluating and comparing your company’s impact relative to any sustainability framework.
What are the benefits of Util's data?
Avoid Unseen Risk
Util’s impact data helps you identify and assess unseen impact risks, such as climate change, resource scarcity, regulatory changes, and reputational risks that may not appear in company disclosures or subjective reports.
Make informed investment decisions
Get evidence-based insights into a company's performance across known sustainability frameworks to understand long-term value, risks, and competitive position so you can make better-informed investment decisions.
Meet client demand, without sacrificing performance
Provide clients with a clear sustainable investing strategy, backed by robust reporting and evidence to meet their investing goals. Plus, discover hidden alpha by seeing how a company’s revenue maps to its stakeholder impact and long-term value.
What makes Util different?
Traceable
Company impact scores are built from peer-reviewed academic research and can be traced back to the research article.
Objective
Based on rigorously reviewed scientific evidence, you can trust that your impact data is free of self-reporting, opinion, + greenwashing claims.
Up-to-Date
As new information and academic research come out, our AI-driven Evidence Engine gets smarter, ensuring you have the most up-to-date data on a company’s impact.
What if a company has positive and negative scores at the same time?
No company, product, or service is unilaterally 'good' or 'bad'.
The world is a complicated place. Electric cars are less polluting than traditional vehicles, so they make the world cleaner. But they’re still cars, which means the rate of accidents, injuries, and deaths doesn't change. So they're not making the world safer.
Companies produce many products and services, each of which can have multiple effects on the world. It gets complex, fast. Our data reveals whether a company’s products are making the world better, or worse, or both — and by how much.
What’s an example of your analytics in action?
Let’s say you’re trying to understand Meta's impact on mental health.
Social media happens to be Meta's only revenue-generating product. Our technology will identify every instance in which a peer-reviewed publication references social media in relation to mental health. Because we access such a significant volume of academic sources, we can automatically establish consensus on the relationship between the product and sustainability concept.
Of course, it’s more nuanced than “Company X is bad for Sustainability Concept Y.” Many companies have more than one product, and each product is going to have myriad positive and negative impacts on myriad sustainability concepts. We capture all of them to holistically show a company's impact.
Why peer-reviewed academic evidence?
We believe the peer-reviewed framework is the most reliable authority on veracity when analysing data at scale as peer-reviewed academic literature is a vast, credible and regularly updated dataset.
We have access to over 120 million academic articles, representing conclusions that are subjected to thorough expert review and reflect the latest scientific findings. This source base allows us to quantify the impact of thousands of companies without relying on biased and variable sources, such as company disclosures, or noisy and sentiment-driven datasets, such as social media.
Why the SDGs?
Our SDG Impact products for Public Companies and Fixed income leverage the UN SDG framework as the 17 goals and 169 sub targets have become a common way to measure impact. The SDGs work as a lens for any market, asset class and geography and can be set as a benchmark for any company thanks to the universality of their underlying principles. They’re a good guide for evaluating not just a company’s risk and reward profile, but also its third dimension: real-world impact.
Achieving the SDGs by 2030 requires an estimated $5-7 trillion per year. Not only do investors have the unique opportunity to bridge that gap, but the outcome will likely support long-term financial returns.
While we use the SDGs as a primary framework, we also have access to thousands of other sustainability concepts.
What sustainability frameworks can Util's data map to?
With Universal Impact, we can map to most known sustainability and impact frameworks, including the UN-SDG, SFDR/ EU Taxonomy, GRI and TNFD, as well as custom, client-defined frameworks.
What is Universal Impact?
Powered by Util’s proprietary Evidence Engine, Universal Impact expands Util’s evidence-driven insights to cover more asset classes and sustainability frameworks, allowing for deeper and more customized analysis that can be used by a broader audience to support more sophisticated analysis.
Universal Impact enables investors to discover and quantify hidden impact risk and unseen value with customized, evidence-based impact data that enables analysis across a broad range of asset classes and sustainability frameworks.
Key Differentiators:
- Exclusive Fixed Income coverage through our partnership with ICE
- Leverages Util’s Proprietary Evidence Engine™ to surface transparent, objective and evidence-based impact data derived from academic research.
- Expanded coverage across Funds, Indexes, Public Companies and Private Companies.
- More data per company than any other SDG offering.
- The ability to map to many impact frameworks, including those that are client-defined.
- Granular data feed down to the sustainability target level, to support deeper, more sophisticated analysis.
Universal Impact’s broad asset coverage includes 50,000 Public Companies (with equity coverage across all major indices and exchanges), Fixed Income (through ICE Sustainable Finance partnership) and 6,000 Funds.
What is SDG Impact for Public Companies?
Powered by Util’s proprietary Evidence Engine, SDG Impact for Public Companies provides detailed, evidence-based impact metrics for 50,000 public companies across the 17 UN SDGs that can be accessed through an intuitive Client Portal and/or popular data marketplaces.
SDG Impact for Public Companies enables investors to access Util’s evidence-driven impact data for over 50,000 Public companies through the lens of the UN-SDGs so that you can grow and retain clients by incorporating sustainability data into their portfolios. This successful first offering from Util has drawn interest from PGIM, Danske Bank, and Degroof Petercam, among others.
Key Differentiators:
- Objective, evidence-based impact data powered by Util’s AI-Driven Evidence Engine
- Can be easily procured through popular data aggregators and marketplaces or accessed through an intuitive portal
- More data per company than any other SDG offering.
What is SDG Impact for Fixed Income?
Through our exclusive partnership with ICE Sustainable Finance, Util's data is available for over 1.2 million fixed-income securities.
SDG Impact for Fixed Income expands Util's asset coverage, via our exclusive partnership with ICE Sustainable Finance, providing evidence-based impact metrics for Fixed Income for all listed companies (50k+) across the 17 UN SDGs.
Key Differentiators:
- Leverages ICE's extensive security-to-entity linkage capabilities to map Util's granular data covering 50,000 public companies to ICE's database of 1.2 million fixed-income securities
- Objective, evidence-based impact data powered by Util’s AI-Driven Evidence Engine
- Can be easily procured via ICE or Util
- More data per security than any other SDG offering