Photographer: Tim Boyle/Bloomberg News.
The demand for responsible investing initiatives, that integrate environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into analysis and decision making, have seen a remarkable rise over the past several years. With the events of recent months shining a light on social inequality and injustice, socially responsible investing has never been so important or so timely.
Nuveen is a $1 trillion global investment management firm and wholly-owned subsidiary of TIAA, a diversified financial services firm, known for its legacy of focusing on managing money for not-for-profit institutions in the academic, research, medical, cultural and government fields.
One of Nuveen’s stated business missions is “to make an enduring impact on our world.” For 120 years Nuveen has invested in the growth of businesses, real estate, farmland, forests, and infrastructure around the globe. The firm has been investing with a responsible approach for over five decades and is a pioneer in this investment discipline.
“Both Wealth and Global Institutional investors want to know that our investment processes include the consideration of material ESG data and factors as a means to generate excess returns and reduce risk,’’ said Mike Perry, head of U.S. Advisory Services at Nuveen.
Nuveen’s commitment to responsible investing is echoed by its parent company, TIAA. On June 3, TIAA President and CEO Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. issued a statement from the firm, observing, “Like so many of you, we at TIAA, TIAA Bank and Nuveen are grieving over the recent senseless and tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. We are pained by these innocent lives cut short. Yet we are heartened by the way countless Americans have stepped up peacefully to demand change.” Ferguson went on to note, “TIAA has made diversity and inclusion a cornerstone of our own culture. In doing so, we have aligned ourselves with the values that you, our clients, live on a day-to-day basis through your inspiring work – values that are grounded in the dignity and worth of every human being.”
Data and analytics form the foundation for Nuveen’s responsible investing approach. Compiling data from 10K and 10Q filings along with real-time market data and community mission and commitment data collected from third-party sources, Nuveen converts this raw information in a systematic process and maintains it on an integrated data management platform.
To support their data-driven responsible investing requirements, Nuveen leverages the Zaloni Data Platform, an integrated data management platform developed by Zaloni, Inc, a Durham, North Carolina based firm which has created a powerful data operations (DataOps) platform. Zaloni provides an active data catalog that enables self-service data enrichment and consumption.
The Nuveen Responsible Investing (RI) Platform combines its own Data Lake (Caspian) technology along with the Zaloni product to ensure a consistent view on a single integrated data management platform. This ensures greater data transparency and integration across all sources, including both structured and unstructured data, including news and incident reports that Nuveen leverages to support responsible investing.
The Zaloni platform incorporates capabilities for data storage, data lineage, data quality and transformation and data visualization. Santanu Sengupta, a managing director at Nuveen, describes the Responsible Investing (RI) Platform as “efficient and easy to use, and highly effective for processing RI data and generating related analytics”. Sengupta notes that Nuveen’s “connect and collect” strategy provides a means to organize and process all of the data, while “federating the analytics capabilities to diverse analytic teams”.
As more investors look to socially responsible and sustainable investing as a way to make investments that are aligned to positive social outcomes, firms like Nuveen and TIAA will strive to stay at the forefront — integrating environmental, social and governance factors into their analysis and decision making — enabled and supported by an integrated data management infrastructure and platform that ensures that these intiatives are data-driven. Doing good while doing well is a laudable achievement.
