Northern Trust Survey: Majority of Institutional Investors Expect to Introduce Climate Risk Profiling Within Two Years

Eighty percent of institutional investors surveyed at a recent event hosted by Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) in Stockholm expect their firm to introduce climate risk profiling within the next two years.

More than 30 Nordic institutional investors were surveyed including some of the largest and most sophisticated asset owners in the world about their perspectives on sustainable investing and maintaining investment oversight.

"Sustainability is the single most significant universal trend we see across our client base,” said Penelope Biggs, head of Northern Trust Institutional Investor Group, across Europe, Middle East and Africa. "Linked to this is a requirement to deliver frequent, high quality information – whether on sustainability, or governance in general to support more informed decision making.”

A third of attendees surveyed also cited "having the right data” as a key challenge to implementing a sustainable investment strategy. The three greatest technical challenges to monitoring and oversight were cost and internal resources (30 percent), data aggregation (27 percent) and investment transparency (27 percent).

"Northern Trust has been working closely with our clients to develop solutions to deliver increasingly intelligent data to address all these needs,” added Biggs. "We have become experts in collating information from multiple sources, normalizing and standardizing the data – regardless of asset type – and then aggregating that information, and delivering it intraday.”

The overwhelming majority of delegates surveyed (90 percent) also expected internal resourcing and the amount of capital allocated to governance and compliance to increase.

In line with supporting clients in their evolving their environment, social and governance strategies, Northern Trust has created an institutional governance monitoring platform designed to automate and simplify oversight for investors. As part of this expansion of its compliance and exposure management product, Northern Trust will add more data for sustainability benchmarks, liquidity risk analysis, and monitoring guidelines.

"The Nordic region has for many years had a strong emphasis on sustainable business, with many institutional investors demonstrating strong leadership addressing climate change risks,” said Bo Thulin, country head, Northern Trust in the Nordics. "Much of the discussion around sustainability is around understanding portfolio risks, and to be sustainable today is dependent to a large extent on finding solutions and innovations to be more efficient.”

Northern Trust Asset Management has run socially responsible investment portfolios for the last twenty five years and has more than US$60 billion dollars invested in relation to sustainability and environmental, social and governance criteria. Northern Trust offers a range of performance, compliance and risk analytics to help institutional investors across the globe understand their exposure, supporting oversight of their sustainability strategies.

About Northern Trust

Northern Trust Corporation (Nasdaq: NTRS) is a leading provider of wealth management, asset servicing, asset management and banking to corporations, institutions, affluent families and individuals. Founded in Chicago in 1889, Northern Trust has offices in the United States in 19 states and Washington, D.C., and 20 international locations in Canada, Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. As of September 30, 2015, Northern Trust had assets under custody of US$6 trillion, and assets under management of US$887 billion. For more than 125 years, Northern Trust has earned distinction as an industry leader for exceptional service, financial expertise, integrity and innovation. Visit northerntrust.com or follow us on Twitter @NorthernTrust.

Northern Trust Corporation, Head Office: 50 South La Salle Street, Chicago, Illinois 60603 U.S.A., incorporated with limited liability in the U.S. Global legal and regulatory information can be found at http://www.northerntrust.com/disclosures.

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