Prime corporate ESG ratings | Insight Investment | Insight Investment

The Prime corporate ESG ratings are applied to corporate entities and aim to highlight ESG risks. They are based on extensive raw data, which is applied to generate scores across 35 key factors. The Prime corporate ESG ratings range from 1 (best possible) to 5 (worst possible).

For more information on the Prime corporate ESG ratings, including how they work and how we use them, please read our in-depth paper here.

This data is transformed into a comparable scale, and then different data is given a larger or smaller weight according to an assessment by Insight's analysts of the quality, fidelity and relevance of the data and different providers' methodologies.

This data then generates scores across 35 key ESG issues. Insight's analysts assign larger or smaller weights to the data across these key issues, according to their relevance for different sectors.

Key issue scores are then aggregated to generate scores focusing on broad themes; separate environmental, social and governance scores; and an overall ESG rating for each issuer.

The Prime corporate ESG ratings online tool aims to help you understand how Prime can help identify key ESG risks for corporate debt issuers, offering a simple visualisation of Prime ESG ratings by industry and region, highlighting notable results.

The Prime corporate ESG rating aims to reflect the level of ESG risk faced by a specific company, that could affect whether the company defaults on its debt. The Prime corporate ESG ratings range from 1 (best possible) to 5 (worst possible).

The Prime corporate ESG ratings cover over 3,000 issuers¹. These include around 95% of mainstream global investment grade corporate bond benchmarks².

Any risks flagged by the system may prompt further investigation or proactive engagement and dialogue with a debt issuer, to investigate issues further, to ensure the highlighted risks are appropriately managed, or to encourage a change in corporate behaviour to mitigate the identified risk. Insight’s ESG team also uses the ESG ratings to monitor company performance and set engagement priorities.

For more information on Insight’s programme of engagement with companies, please see our annual stewardship report. In 2022, we conducted over 1,240 engagements with debt issuers, of which the majority included some form of ESG dialogue. These included over 140 engagements focused solely on ESG issues.